Post B9Zdgj0P5CbLfm1HCy by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
(DIR) More posts by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
(DIR) Post #AdWDMHONBzXVqstGM4 by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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I've said this before butSoftware freedom is not when the source code for the program you use is somewhere on github, has 5000 dependencies and doesn't build outside of CISoftware freedom is when you have the source on your computer, modify it, build it, and run a modified versionHow much of the software you use on a daily basis would you be able to build from source? How many urls does that require fetching, and how many of these can stop working any time without prior notice?1/
(DIR) Post #B9YVkbloxeWabJzZeS by tranquillity@mastodon.minionflo.net
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@wolf480pl alldepends on the sw? Manually, usually one, rest is done by the build system, which might or might not request more stuffI haven't had them break outside of the usual GitHub outage
(DIR) Post #B9YaRDD2WYfLh6si5A by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@tranquillityWhen I was writing that post, GitHub outages weren't usual.The point is, GitHub could go down and never come back. Or the owners of some of the repos could delete old releases, or delete their repos, or those repos could get DMCAd...Link rot is a thing.
(DIR) Post #B9YiZ505jAZOBX5U6C by tranquillity@mastodon.minionflo.net
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@wolf480pl Ah, that wasn't obvious from the post at all, sorryYea, true, src should get mirrored more imoEven source-based package managers (Portage, Nix...) only keep the source around temporarily, eg. on Gentoo the only difference being certain packages like sys-kernel/gentoo-sources that keeps the Linux kernel around in /usr/src/Mostly the issue is storage space, I sometimes wish we just had standardized smth like /usr/src to keep package sources around at that the user can edit
(DIR) Post #B9YjEcMSb7TzWaMCxs by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@tranquillity with Debian at least the distro mirrors host source packages in addition to binary packages
(DIR) Post #B9YjH8dtY27aDpiKnY by tranquillity@mastodon.minionflo.net
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@wolf480pl Ah interesting, didn't know Debian did that
(DIR) Post #B9ZZ2h5aOBpsKT6FyS by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@khinsen It's not entirely lost.I'm talking about running modified versions because I've done it, and I've felt how liberating it is.Even the ability to just read the source code when you want to know how something works, as opposed to wrestling with incomplete/outdated documentation, feels quite liberating.There are still many barriers that mean not everyone can do that, and not with every piece of nominally-free software, but there are projects that are doing it right.
(DIR) Post #B9Zb0jbmFfAdTILnZg by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@khinsen Having read 2.4 of the linked article, I think "convival software" is close to what I consider the spirit of Free Software, and I definitely thing user agency is the spiritual goal of Free Software, even if the real-world practitioners of Free Software have forgotten about it.However, for me, software freedom is an individual freedom - one that a person (ideally every person) should be able to exercise even if nobody else does thatNot sure if that matches convival software
(DIR) Post #B9ZbIY51qsXwviWkRU by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@khinsen That being said, a research paper is usually descriptive rather than prescriptive, right? In which case it makes sense to use a new term to describe the old convival free software, and the term Free Software to describe what the movement has become now.
(DIR) Post #B9Zd8pBNbuPSz6zMUC by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@eta @Ninji Yeah, that's a good blog post.I agree that Linux distros should make it easier to maintain local patches and automatically apply them on every update (maybe Gentoo or NixOS have sth like this? haven't checked)I also think it would be better if FOSS devs focused more on providing stable interfaces (so that updates break less stuff) and also design their software as a set of primitives for the users to build from - like done by OG Unix, Minecraft, probably also Shortcuts and Cydia
(DIR) Post #B9Zdgj0P5CbLfm1HCy by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@eta @Ninji Speaking of Minecraft:- Minecraft mods suffer from "gets broken every update" even more than downstream patches of FOSS software- Minecraft (Java)'s development philosophy, from what I've seen, has always been "give users some fun primitives, and see how they combine them in ways we didn't expect". Mojang keeps bugs in the game because players found fun and creative uses for those bugs. So modding isn't really that adversarial IMOStill, I agree Minecraft is a good example
(DIR) Post #B9ZiY3BLCJrrPgony4 by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@eta @Ninji oh, also, the old Unix/Linux ecosystem had a tradition of writing glue code in shell, which I think yielded a lot of user-extensible pieces of FOSS (although mostly non-GUI ones)- init scripts that control system startup used to be in shell- many network-related programs, like pppd, dhclient, or openvpn, use shell scripts as hooks to propagate network configuration info and events to the rest of the system- OpenWrt's integration of network types is mostly shell scripts1/
(DIR) Post #B9ZigsWsAp6oys6DyK by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@eta @Ninji sadly, with things like systemd or iwd, the customizable shell glue is becoming less common2/2
(DIR) Post #B9Zj7fFFfix1bDd6bw by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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@khinsen Oh, also, I think convival software doesn't have to be less reviewable. Smalltalks are an extreme example where the whole thing is being distributed as a fully persistent memory image. But it doesn't have to be that way.If Unix CLI utils are convival, then after you've reviewed Unix itself the scripts that people write with them should be relatively small.If people have local patches and you've reviewed the upstream, you just review the patches.