

Who is the enemy of FOSS today? - Sandman
http://michuk.posterous.com/who-is-the-enemy-of-floss-today

======
mahmud
I read the title and thought "Apple". Everything about the company smells of
evil, and I am reminded of this every morning when I need to download my news
podcasts for the road; I have always copied and pasted audio files into every
MP3 player I owned, but with the iPod, I need to launch the horrible iTunes
and drag programs into my iPod. Should I plug my device into any other
computer with iTunes, it would attempt to reset its memory and initialize it
for _this_ other iTunes :-/

~~~
blasdel
Congratulations, you're one of the %0.1 of people that wants to manually copy
files from your manually-organized arbitrary directory structure onto your
music player's filesystem. To support that, the player has to index all the
files itself when it boots up, which is why the old Nomad took minutes to be
ready to hit play.

Everyone else uses a database-backed program that automatically organizes
their collection (iTunes), and expects to synchronize from that database to
their device. If you weren't so set on doing things the way you did them in
1998, you'd be fine with iTunes — it can automatically download the podcast
files, and synchronize that playlist when you plug in the device to charge it.

~~~
jdc
0.1% of what population? Anyone who uses P2P music sharing is going to store
their music in a manually-organized directory structure by necessity, and as a
result, will have few problems dragging and dropping the root music directory
into another one.

~~~
pie
I don't even want to think how long it would take to tag 4,000 albums properly
either. This fear alone keeps me away from database-backed music systems.

~~~
whatusername
So if you have 4,000 albums that _don't_ have a database - try this:
<http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm>

It will take the data from your MP3 Directory structure - lets say something
like Artist/Album/song -- and automatically generate the correct tags for you.

------
naner
The enemy of FLOSS is convienence and ease-of-use. I'm not trying to be
snarky: I'm typing this on Firefox in Linux and I've almost excusively been on
Linux since 2002. I've been elbow deep in this stuff for years, hacking and
tweaking and experimenting, etc. I'm at the end of my rope, about to jump to
Apple with all the lock-in and overpriced shit and inflexibility and patent
abuse, etc. At least it is easy to use and maintain and has many powerful,
flexible and even niche applications. And well-supported libraries.

I'm starting to see those free software ideals I've held so dear turn into
tradeoffs. I'll trade in some 'freedoms' for more capable, abundant, and
better supported software that allows me to get work done easier and more
effectively.

If RMS wanted GNU software to spread then he shouldn't have gone into politics
and preaching. He should have made sure that GNU software was more useful to
the software users. To most people software freedom is too intangible to be
counted as a benefit. Hell, 99.9% of people couldn't even explain it in very
basic terms if you asked them. He's just created software for enthusiasts and
hobbyists. Not a bad thing, but not his goal either.

Anyways, I've grown out of it.

I'm just talking about consumer-facing software, by the way. I know free
software will always have value in education, commodity software that is not
your primary business, etc. It is always going to be an abysmal failure on the
desktop unless a free software Steve Jobs appears out of thin air, though.

~~~
tzs
"If RMS wanted GNU software to spread then he shouldn't have gone into
politics and preaching. He should have made sure that GNU software was more
useful to the software users"

Indeed, consider this alternate timeline whose RMS is more pragmatic and
willing to give up a few short term small victories in order to win big in the
end:

It's the late '70s. The microprocessor revolution is just getting started. RMS
and his band of wily hackers jump onboard, realizing there is going to be a
lot of money to be made, and that a person with a lot of money can do a lot
more good than a person without a lot of money.

They make a decision: they will go commercial, amass a fortune, and then
retire to promote their ideal free software world.

It's GNU BASIC that Altair picks up in this timeline, not MS BASIC. It's RMS
that gets the IBM deal. It's RMS that becomes the world's richest man.

25 years later, RMS retires, and then sets up the FSF, endowed with about $50
billion dollars. With just the investment income, not touching the principle
at all, the FSF is generating enough money to be able to give out 50000 grants
a year that each pay a developer for one year's full time work on free
software.

In 10 years, the FSF has produced GPL replacements for every important piece
of non-free generally available software on the planet. The only non-GPL
software left is internal things on corporate intranets.

------
kprobst
Every day I am more convinced that the enemies of FOSS are the borderline
morons that descend on articles like that one to "tell it like it is" with "M$
IS TEH DEVILZ LOLZ" prose that only makes everyone else shake their heads in
disgust or shame.

Microsoft would do a far better job at discrediting FOSS if they simply
flooded the internet with astroturfers that mimic the FOSS nutjobs.

~~~
bediger
I've heard the paranoid ascribe FOSS nutjobs to Microsoft Astroturfing
efforts. This character emailed me claiming that the bellicose, "F*ck MSFT!"
mouth-breathers were really Waggoner-Edstrom shills.

~~~
epochwolf
fsck? (It probably needs it.)

------
adriand
One thing I find a bit silly about this debate is how seriously we developers
tend to take it. We toss around words like "enemy", "devil", and "evil", to
describe a company that manufactures consumer electronics.

I realize that many of us care deeply about open source software, and hope
that the field we work in does not become tightly controlled, but let's face
it: it's not like Apple is producing weapons of mass destruction, or cheap
guns intended for street gangs, or cigarettes.

If we showed an iPad to the average person, and said, "Look how EVIL this
is!", they'd probably be more than a little confused.

~~~
kylemathews
This was exactly my thought. My second thought was Clay Shirky's classic "A
Group is its Own Worst Enemy"
<http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

He quotes from research derived from watching a group of neurotics that
consistently defended itself against his [the researcher] attempts to make
them do what they had ostensible gathered themselves together for. The second
pattern of defensive behavior was identifying a common enemy. Clay writes:

"The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and
vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who
was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the
time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to
do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and
Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so
mad.

If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open
Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the
froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to
galvanize like an external enemy.

So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can
cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards
members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the
people who are best at identifying external enemies."

So let's forget about Apple or Microsoft or any other so-called-enemy for
awhile and get back to coding and "defeat" them the old-fashioned way.

------
jorgecastillo
<sarcasm> I am in total accordance with you. Apple is pure evil just imagine
they had the core of their operating system(Darwin) open sourced even if they
didn't need it to. They contribute to some high profile open source
projects(WebKit, LLVM & SproutCore). Their web browser is standards compliant
and their competitors can use the same rendering engine. And you can choose to
buy an Apple product or not. We need to stop them now before they destroy our
freedom forever. </sarcasm>

------
steveklabnik
I'm not sure that promoting an alternate development model really means "the
enemy" of FOSS. If you'd ask RMS, he'd probably say so, but I don't see why
Apple's closed model and FOSS' open one can't co-exist. Also, it's not like
Apple is attacking OSS, it's playing nicely as well as sponsoring several
large projects.

If Apple is the enemy of FOSS, we've got a rosy future.

~~~
orangecat
_Also, it's not like Apple is attacking OSS_

Apple's lawsuit against HTC effectively asserts that Android is illegal.
That's a rather big deal; there are three mobile computing platforms that
matter, and Android is the only one that's open.

~~~
bbgm
And they would have done that whether Android was open source or not. You
could argue that if Android was not open source, it wouldn't be doing as well
as it is, but the lawsuit is about Android's success not the open source
nature

~~~
orangecat
Maybe. Although I can see Apple being much happier to split the market with
Microsoft and their equally closed Windows mobile devices than with Android.
Open platforms lead to disruptive innovations, which are often bad for market
leaders.

------
known
I think _free software_ is enemy of _open source_ software.

