Help Us Hack The Software Industry!!!

  Blender Dumbass
November 26, 2024

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#FreeSoftware #UserFreedom #Privacy #GNU #Linux #OpenSource

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It is predominantly easy to just accept bad conditions when an alternative is seemingly unfeasible. "I need this software", a lot of us will say when even presented with a better alternative. A lot of us will argue to our bones that being subject to cruelty from software developers is necessary for one potential gain or another. All of which creates a feedback loop of re-enforcement of this parasitic idea that proprietary software is somehow inescapable and we need to give up trying to do something about it. But we shouldn't give up and we should fight. Not just to switch from Windows to GNU / Linux, but to make it so Windows itself will start respecting you too.

It sounds absurd to suggest that great enemy of all Free Software, the Microsoft Corporation will take steps into the direction of user freedom. The direction they currently take with their "holes in the walls" operating system number 11 is not giving any hope that this company could ever change the direction of their development. Right?

So far the odds are on their side. Even with some progress toward Free Software being pre-installed on some brands of computerized products, the predominant force in the market remains to be Microsoft, with Apple ( an arguably worse company when it comes to respecting users ) coming second. Just choosing to buy a computer with GNU / Linux is not even an option most of the time. So hackers like myself have to change the operating system ourselves.

Microsoft being threatened by this ability introduces ways to trap the user even further, making the switching cost extremely high. Apparently people need computers so much that they will accept whatever terms that come with them to have a privilege of using one. Microsoft and other firms, such as Apple, capitalize on this mass-hysteria and treat it the same way drug-lords treat crack-heads.

Can you personally do without cocaine? I hope that you, the reader of this article, are not addicted to cocaine. If you are, I'm sorry, the next point needs you not to be, so I guess if you are addicted to it, please try to imagine that you are not. Here comes a person and asks you to get, maybe even to try it for free, some of the most addictive and brain-rotting drugs in existence. Would you, given what you know about the drug, given what you know about the long list of its side-effects, given all the freedom that you will lose to that dealer if you get addicted to it, try it anyway? The dealer might have arguments: Cocaine is better at waking you up than caffeine, he might say. It is more effective and so on and so forth. And yet you know that any potential benefit that that drug could give you is completely overshadowed by all the harm that it comes with. So you don't agree to that.

I view those kinds of things relativistically. Banning dangerous substances or banning proprietary software tends to create more oppression than freedom. And what we want is 100% freedom. Which is an unrealistic goal! It is impossible! Yet this is what we should try to achieve, regardless of the underline apparent insanity of it. If we don't try to achieve it, Freedom breaks apart like an unstable chemical.

Some Power is always required for Freedom to exist. I talked about this in my previous article and in many other articles. You can't have a system which doesn't punish ambitions of those who want to take your freedom. This is what governments and police are for! Yet we cannot give them too much Power, since this is something we are fighting against in the first place.

With software a lot of people lose freedom all the time. Windows is so predominately used that I don't understand why people don't get crazy over this. Yet banning Windows would be a problem, arguably a worse problem, than all those people using it. You should have the right to use software that you want to use, the same way as you should have the right to agree with that drug-lord. The fact that people have the choice to use something like Windows is not a problem. The problem is that Windows is not respecting the person back. There are two ways to solve this problem. One would be to chose something else. Another would be to make Windows better.

If you think that it is impossible to push on corporations with enough force, so they would yield, and start respecting freedom of people, you don't know nothing. Progress in this area has been done numerous times. Netscape Navigator, a popular 90s web-browser, became Free Software, and now it is known as Firefox. Linux, the kernel so associated with Free Software, was at some point proprietary. Blender was proprietary before 2002. Unreal Engine started releasing their sources to people. Not under a very freedom respecting license, but it is a start. And it is way better than having nothing at all. Hell Microsoft, of all companies, started developing Free Software. Visual Studio Code, their text editor from Microsoft is mostly Free Software. Hell "Meta" the Facebook company jumped onto the Mastadon bandwagon with their Threads. Not a very good thing. But them embracing Freedom is progress. And there are more examples of this, which I hope you would provide by using the comment section, that I worked so hard to make, in the bottom of this article.

We did all this by not yielding. Most web-servers are running on Free Software because configuring proprietary software is a nightmare. Proprietary software is basically incompatible with configurability. And configurability is a key to development. Hell, most software development happens on GNU / Linux for that same reason. So much so that Microsoft reacted and put what they call "Windows Subsystem for Linux" on their system, to get some developers away from GNU / Linux. But they are doing bad job themselves. They are constantly worsening the conditions on their systems so much so that people fly out of there as soon as they know how.

Enshitification cannot happen forever. At some point people just can't take this no longer. They would not use computers at all if that came to it. But it doesn't need to come to it. There is software available right now to switch to. Software protected from enshitification by respecting freedom. But no... "I have to use it!", right?

Computers are interesting beasts. They are designed to run anything. Any computation can be done. Any digital information can be processed in any way what so ever. All you need to do is to tell the computer how to do it. And it will!

There was a time where almost nothing was possible with Free Software. It was many decades ago. And what people did about it? Did they yield to the corporations? Well some did, yes. But a lot of us stood up and said "Enough!". And we developed one tool after another. First a text editor. Then a compiler. Then a whole operating system. Why? Because we wanted those same features as in proprietary software, but without the terrible terms. Without the disrespect. Without the slavery. And it was not impossible.

Those corporations did not like it. They still don't like it. But they have no choice. We can always tell the computer to do something ourselves. And the only way they can stop us from having this freedom is if we yield to them.

The more people using Free Software, the less they can control us. The less they will have a choice. More people using Free Software is more pressure on those corporations to release their software as Free Software. They can. And they will. If people will not yield under any circumstances to their dubious demands, they will remove the demands. If people will not blindly use a program that they don't like, that disrespects them constantly, the program will have no other choice, but to stop disrespecting.

But more than that. The more people respect themselves, the more people use Free Software, the more feedback loop, more re-enforcement Freedom itself has. And in a few decades, after the war for Freedom is over, those trying to argue for proprietary software will be met with "I need to use it" as a counter argument. Which this time I will support.

Happy Hacking!!!

Thumbnail uses image by devdsp "Hacker Stock Photo" CC-BY

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  翠星石 c:0


It was proprietary when released in 1991 (sale and many distribution methods was restricted; source ) and was relicensed to the GPLv2-ambigious in 1992; source

Linux was made proprietary again in 1996 via the inclusion of the first proprietary program disguised as an array of numbers; source

It took Linus until 2000 to clarify that he meant GPLv2-only; source

It's 100% proprietary, as binaries of vscode are released under a proprietary license that forbids reverse engineering; source

They have separately released what they claim to be the source code under MIT expat

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

, but it doesn't appear to correspond as per this sentence; "Visual Studio Code is a distribution of the Code - OSS repository with Microsoft-specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license."

It appears that microsoft has done what they usually do and have added spyware and malware and of course has tried to make it illegal to reverse engineer it and find the malware;
- "Data Collection. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft."
- "You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the software except and solely to the extent required by third party licensing terms governing use of certain open source components that may be included in the software;"

Ideally you could avoid that by just compiling the sources, but actually getting it to compile appears to require many hours of work by several people looking at the vscodium project;

git clone https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

Unfortunately, many computers now have digital handcuffs in them that causes the computer to disobey the users commands, meaning that there is no guarantee that the computer will do what you tell it to, even if you tell it how to do it correctly.

Intel CPUs after 2008 will not even make it to code execution without proprietary init software executed on the ME and even if you were to write a replacement program that does the job, the ME would refuse to execute it, as that wouldn't pass a RSA signature check (Intel, the NSA, Mossad and other parties probably have the RSA private key(s), while you don't (Intel mainly operates in the USA and Israel and if either government demands private keys, Intel has to hand them over and realistically they have done so long ago)).

Intel CPUs from 2008 and before are fine, as those do not have digital handcuffs and many intel systems from that time are supported with 100% free software; source

AMD processors after seemingly 2015 have the same issue with the PSP, but the details are lacking, even then, certain pre-PSP AMD systems are very good and very stable; source

Of course, past hardware init, there are many different kinds of handcuffing mechanisms implemented and upcoming to ensure that what should be your computer doesn't obey your orders.


Although it is difficult, thankfully you can still get computers that will obey your instructions, with fast CPUs and ample RAM; source



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  Blender Dumbass c:1


This Article was inspired by a conversation with @Uriel_Cohen .

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