A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
Posted Apr 2, 2023 15:01 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)Parent article: A quarter century of Mozilla
Firefox is not meant for niche users who care about free software purism. It is meant for the masses and tries to balance concerns about free software, privacy and tracking, security, with usability and functionality and as far as I am concerned it succeeds perfectly. The one remaining issue I had (gallery view on zoom calls; I prefer zoom on browser for various reasons) was fixed about a year ago.
I shuttled back and forth between chrome and firefox for a while, but about 2018 I settled on firefox as primary browser on desktop/laptop, simply because it felt faster and didn't bog down my laptop which had (at that time) 4GB RAM. In 2019 I found that disabling the preinstalled chrome on my new phone got rid of an annoying spam-ad problem. I have stuck with firefox on the phone since. I have no complaints whatever. What I have complaints about is sites like NYT and reddit that nag you to install their app because it's "so much better". No, thanks, I'll read it on firefox.
And of course Mozilla is responsible for rust which is responsible for the rapid development of linux GPU drivers on Apple M1/M2 hardware.
Firefox may have a minor market share but to keep it going so long as, not a "viable", but an almost 100% functional alternative to the Webkit/Blink duopoly is remarkable.
Lastly, maybe Mitchell Baker said she doesn't believe all software has to be open source. (I didn't see a link.) But even if so, I'm pretty sure many many free software developers share that view.
Posted Apr 2, 2023 15:27 UTC (Sun)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
No link here (on mobile), but the issue is that Pocket was announced for opening when acquired. That was walked back, apparently with such a reason.
See also this project: https://github.com/open-pocket/open-pocket
Posted Apr 3, 2023 11:06 UTC (Mon)
by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406)
[Link]
Thank you!
Posted Apr 3, 2023 22:46 UTC (Mon)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (23 responses)
Correct.
Free software developers think that all published software should be free. They don't care about open source.
Posted Apr 4, 2023 1:52 UTC (Tue)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (22 responses)
Some do. Some don’t. It’s not a religion.
Posted Apr 4, 2023 8:42 UTC (Tue)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (21 responses)
Depends on the space you're working in, but eg if things are distributed as scripts there's precious little difference. If you're working on infra *because* you care about *user space*, you have to accept that taking a position will damage what you care about. Etc etc.
Some people are happy with either and will use whatever furthers their ends.
Cheers,
Posted Apr 4, 2023 10:25 UTC (Tue)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (20 responses)
Both terms are misleading. Free does not mean no cost. Open source does not mean just sharing source code (so even "scripts" would have a licence).
Perhaps "libre software" is best, it's a sufficiently non-intuitive term that one has to ask what exactly it means.
The grey area is web apps. If you are not explicitly downloading and running them (but your web browser is doing that), do licence rules apply?
Posted Apr 4, 2023 11:18 UTC (Tue)
by amacater (subscriber, #790)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Apr 4, 2023 11:57 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (11 responses)
Yes, everyone here understands what the word "free" means in the context of the phrase "free software", but the GP's point was that it's a misleading term, which really doesn't seem disputable.
I guarantee there isn't a single English-speaking person in the world who understood that meaning the first time they heard the phrase, without it having to be explained to them.
Posted Apr 7, 2023 16:23 UTC (Fri)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (10 responses)
Who would have thought that English has been replaced by (a different) Newspeak.
Posted Apr 7, 2023 17:18 UTC (Fri)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link] (9 responses)
The English word <free> /friː/ still has multiple meanings, including "without cost" and "without restriction".
However! When we use words that have two (or more) meanings, people will tend to assume the meaning that makes the most sense to them.
Software is lifeless and mindless in the same way as a freshly cooked lunch, a bottle of filtered pasteurized beer, or a housebrick.
Software is frequently an article of commerce.
"Software that costs zero dollars" is therefore the most plausible automatic disambiguation of the term "free software" for anyone who is not deeply immersed in the liberty-focused discourse of the Free Software movement.
Posted Apr 11, 2023 15:51 UTC (Tue)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (8 responses)
If, as nye claims, these days not a single English-speaking person in the world understands "free software" as being related to freedom without extra explanation, and that, as many claim, the only intuitive meaning these days is "software without cost", then the meaning of "free" in English has changed indeed.
You point to the fact that software is frequently an article of commerce, and that may be the cause for the "without cost" meaning. But it seems to me that software is not more frequently an article of commerce than four decades ago, and we now have a free software ecosystem that should help with understanding what "free software" means.
Posted Apr 11, 2023 16:44 UTC (Tue)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (7 responses)
....Intuitive?
That significant numbers of people (at the time) understood and bought into it doesn't make it "intuitive"; it just means that those folks had it explained to them "enough" for them to buy into it.
To the average person, software user, and even "developer", "free software" means "software without cost" -- the only ones who would ever think differently are those who had alternative meanings explained to them.
RMS still had to explain himself back then, and he's _still_ explaining himself to this day..
Posted Apr 11, 2023 17:34 UTC (Tue)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (6 responses)
It may be that non-developers these days will indeed think of software without cost when they hear "free software", after all they are not directly confronted with the freedom aspects of software, and in their contact with various commercial software (even if some of it is free software) the commercial interests run against making them aware of that.
Software developers have more interaction with software, and they do more thinking about software. For them the freedom aspect is closer to home, although maybe the powers that be have indeed managed to make it unintuitive to everyone. But that was not the case four decades ago.
Yes, even four decades ago there were people who needed the freedom aspect explained to them, and RMS has done that. But not everyone. I certainly never thought that "free software" means "software without cost".
Posted Apr 11, 2023 18:04 UTC (Tue)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
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I came of age during the BBS/"shareware" era. I didn't have access to, or even any awareness of, "Free Software" (of the RMS sense) until _after_ I had first been exposed to Linux in the mid 90s. To me and my peers, "free software" meant "zero-cost" -- along the lines of freeware or shareware, and to the rest who only had to use software as a tool (or entertainment) "free software" was a more charitable way of saying "warez".
These days, with Linux just being a hidden implementation detail [1], I'd postulate that the overwhelming majority of software folks (and software-adjacent) folks are very aware of "Open Source", and if they're aware of the term "Free Software" at all, most consider it to be synonymous with Open Source. When they think of it differently, it's along the lines of "those out of touch communist zealots who think we shouldn't even be allowed to charge for (or be forced to otherwise give away) our valuable software" [2]
[1] It's just another app you install from the windows store so you can run (predominantly) third-party black-box kubernetes/docker/etc containers locally when you're trying to develop "for the cloud".
Posted Apr 11, 2023 18:24 UTC (Tue)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
But if I had encountered the term without the explanation attached, I hazard that I would likely have defaulted to the "as in beer" interpretation.
Posted Apr 12, 2023 12:16 UTC (Wed)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (3 responses)
Is this because the term was immediately preceded or followed by some explanatory context? Most of us here probably first came across it in the context of something like this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. Here, the FSF starts off by defining what "free" means - because they correctly recognise that without that explanation, nobody will understand what they mean. This is the norm anywhere that the phrase is used unless it's intended specifically for an audience that's already familiar with the culture.
Or are you claiming that you first encountered it in a more general sentence like "we could use free software for this", or "we should release this as free software"? Because if that's the case, and you claim to have correctly understood the phrase, I would contend that either you are not a native English speaker, or your memory is in error.
Posted Apr 12, 2023 12:18 UTC (Wed)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
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Posted Apr 12, 2023 17:57 UTC (Wed)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (1 responses)
I am not a native speaker, but I don't think that plays a role: If I had encountered a lot of usage of "free" as meaning "no cost", that would be what I would (also) associate with that word, just like I learned that "terrific" has a positive meaning.
By the time I encountered "free software" I had read many thousands of pages of English books (including 1984) and other texts, and the proportion of "free" used as meaning "without cost" was vanishingly small (including in 1984). I did have some exposure to commercials through magazines like Byte, but certainly less than a native speaker, and I would have to dig up these old issues and see if there was much usage of "free" with that meaning there.
Posted Apr 12, 2023 18:42 UTC (Wed)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
In the very next paragraph, you make statements which make me think that it very much played a role; it sounds like the English-language material to which you were exposed was not representative of a native speaker's daily exposure to the English language.
Posted Apr 4, 2023 18:41 UTC (Tue)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (6 responses)
As far as I know there are some (obscure) licenses that are open source but not free software. But that's beside the point. Free Software is a philosophy (or moral point of view, a social movement, etcetera) that stipulates that all (distributed) software ought to be free. Open Source is a software development method that basically claims that it will lead to better software. (Users of Microsoft Office, macOS, iOS and whatever else is amazingly popular and rather useful might disagree.)
Posted Apr 4, 2023 20:57 UTC (Tue)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
"Better" and "useful" are different words, with different meanings. Word may be *useful*, but imho there are much *better* word processors out there WordPerfect cough cough ... (sorry LO you're too much of a Word clone to be any better).
Cheers,
Posted Apr 7, 2023 18:21 UTC (Fri)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Apr 7, 2023 18:43 UTC (Fri)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Yes. It also goes further than that. It is entirely possible for people to use the term - free software and not buy into the notion that GNU FDL is a free documentation license or the strategy around firmware is the right one or that GPLv3 handling of Tivo or Novell patent clauses were the right ones and so forth. It may be indicative that they are more sympathetic to the RMS view on things but not conclusively so. Insisting that they do is likely going to end up with more people adopting a different term - open source or libre software or something else.
Posted Apr 7, 2023 20:53 UTC (Fri)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (2 responses)
But the distinction between Free Software and Open Source is pretty fundamental. There actually are projects that consider themselves a "free software project" and those projects have certain boundaries they simply won't cross. So, yes, there are differences between Free Software and Open Source.
That projects are inanimate, that their developers are not a monolith, etc. are rather banal observations. (Your use of "ideological purity tests" is below the pretty high standard I'm used to see you use here, so I won't react to that.)
But, being in a sombre mood, I'm inclined to state state that Open Source has won. Most of the software I currently use is developed by people employed by extremely profitable corporations with ethics that I don't share. Yes, it's Open Source but it's seems to be written by people that noticed that money doesn't smell.
Posted Apr 7, 2023 22:18 UTC (Fri)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (1 responses)
There are projects with things like the DFSG, it is true, but if I'm honest, the DFSG is the *only* example I can think of off the top of my head. The vast majority of FOSS projects are quite informal. Some of them do have codes of conduct or such, but this is typically more of a "be nice to each other" type of document than a "here's what we believe about the end user's freedoms" document.
> That projects are inanimate, that their developers are not a monolith, etc. are rather banal observations.
So what? This is not a refutation.
Either there is a difference between a "free software project" and an "open source project," or there isn't. I have yet to see any such difference put forward that I can seriously evaluate as an intrinsic property of the projects themselves. Instead, it is always an extrinsic property of the developers who happen to work on the project, and it is my opinion that such a definition is not particularly useful or informative. The actual projects do not materially differ in terms of the development processes, legal structures, or the rights and responsibilities of their developers and users. RMS likes to claim that "free software development" and "open source development" are entirely separate activities and movements (when he mentions "open source" at all), but I'm unconvinced that there is much truth to that. They are the same thing, just with different labels.
> Your use of "ideological purity tests" is below the pretty high standard I'm used to see you use here, so I won't react to that.
I'm not sure why this should be seen as inflammatory. My point is simply that neither brand of project makes any serious effort to keep out the developers who subscribe to the other brand, so while a project may choose to market itself as "free software" or "open source," there is no particular reason to believe that its developers actually subscribe to that belief. Sure, if a lot of developers were actively opposed to the label, they might change it, but it's my impression that most developers, frankly, do not care one way or the other, and so you end up with passive branding that means nothing and says nothing.
(Perhaps this is because people see the term "purity" as a snarl word? I did not intend it as such, but I suppose it could be read that way. I would like to reiterate that such testing is *not* something that the vast majority of projects do, and in fact I'm not aware of any project having done it. I only said "vast majority" because I did not want to make an absolute and unqualified claim, not because I think that some project out there is actually doing it.)
Posted Apr 11, 2023 6:03 UTC (Tue)
by viiru (subscriber, #53129)
[Link]
> I'm not sure why this should be seen as inflammatory. My point is simply that neither brand of project makes any serious
> (Perhaps this is because people see the term "purity" as a snarl word? I did not intend it as such, but I suppose it could be
I'll note here that understanding and agreeing to uphold the DFSG is a required step in being accepted as a Debian Developer. Whether this qualifies as an ideological purity test or not I couldn't say.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
Wol
A quarter century of Mozilla
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A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.
(George Orwell, 1984, appendix)
A quarter century of Mozilla
Four decades ago it was still intuitive that "free software" meant something other than "software without cost", as evidenced by the fact that RMS used the term and a significant number of people got it easily enough to support the cause.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
I don't think that the term would have been as successful as it was if it had not been intuitive for many people; maybe not the majority, but certainly a significant number.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
[2] Which isn't accurate or fair, but as the saying goes, perception is reality.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
I don't remember where I encountered it, but I remember that I never had the need for a realignment of the meaning.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
Wol
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
> effort to keep out the developers who subscribe to the other brand, so while a project may choose to market itself as "free
> software" or "open source," there is no particular reason to believe that its developers actually subscribe to that belief. Sure,
> if a lot of developers were actively opposed to the label, they might change it, but it's my impression that most developers,
> frankly, do not care one way or the other, and so you end up with passive branding that means nothing and says nothing.
> read that way. I would like to reiterate that such testing is *not* something that the vast majority of projects do, and in fact
> I'm not aware of any project having done it. I only said "vast majority" because I did not want to make an absolute and
> unqualified claim, not because I think that some project out there is actually doing it.)