>The FSF's focus on TPMs here is not only technically wrong, it's indicative of a failure to understand what's actually happening in the industry.
This sounds 100% on-brand for the FSF. The FSF's primary public-facing persona has peculiar computing habits so far removed from the mainstream that it's likely he has absolutely no clue how the real world works.
In fact by his own statement he has to rely on volunteers to update his website.
It's disappointing to me because the FSF could be so much more influential today, but the cult of personality around RMS has really destroyed their public credibility among "normies", the most important demographic to convince.
When the FSF finally realizes that a political organization such as theirs needs a public face with charisma and social skills, it will be too late.
“Normies” are never going to care about the stuff the FSF is interested in. I don’t think you can extract the philosophy from the eccentric personalities that created it, they’re one in the same.
And how are they best convinced? Besides personal benefits like bribes, public opinion (re-election) and consumer habits (company profitability) seem to matter significantly. Please do add the options that I am forgetting.
No matter who is re-elected, there's a preset window for law & policy, which perhaps only public outrage (and opportunist politicians) can shift. Outrage is a high bar (may be perhaps outside of Twitter).
If you believe that normies deserve computing freedom (this doesn’t seem to entirely be consensus in the scene), it ought to be a goal to explain the benefits of it in a way that they will understand. Some may still not care, but my experience is that a good part actually does. If nothing else this is good leverage to influence change for one‘s own interest.
The benefits are incomprehensible to "normies" and they have no power to effect change. They're just going to use whatever software gets put in front of them. All the progress - which has been substantial, free software is basically everywhere and does everything - has come from highly motivated and technical individuals who are anything but normal.
That follows a basic pattern for any effective change, normal people pretty much always just whinge and achieve nothing. They're lucky to even be allowed the pittance of political power that is voting, historically speaking.
Most people just want to be able to access media easily with no effort- which they already can do with cheap streaming subscriptions. They have no interest in owning the rights to use it forever, or in downloading or copying it. They wouldn't want to take the time to figure out how to do that, even if they legally could when they can already just click and play.
I think if you want people to care, you need to find a real world case where they are being blocked from doing something they really want to do- the abstract philosophical arguments about freedom are total non-starters.
Possibly an alternative media supplier that was fundamentally less hassle, faster, and more reliable because it didn't have these systems could get people to switch. But good luck getting the digital rights owners to let you put their content on your platform.
Or maybe convince people they can get higher quality media that way. I have a newish Mac with an amazing HDR screen, but few of the streaming sites are willing to stream the HDR content to my device.
I think that's a misunderstanding of what the FSF stands for overall, though. The FSF can never be a diplomatic negotiator for the benefit of free software; they are idealists, even when it serves against their own interests. Their whole shtick is not settling for half-baked appeasements, and so they're destined to be a pariah of the tech industry at-large. Neither you nor me can stop them, it's entirely within their right to advocate and for practice simpler software.
The statement criticized by the OP certainly seems warranted, but it's less endemic of the FSF removing itself from the mainstream and more like the mainstream has abandoned free software.
> The FSF's primary public-facing persona has peculiar computing habits
You know, the FSF would probably argue that our computing habits are the peculiar one. And unless you can tell me about the code your iPhone runs in detail, they're probably (albeit begrudgingly) correct.
There's no misunderstanding on my part; it's why I said that their ignorance is totally on-brand.
>more like the mainstream has abandoned free software.
Indeed, because free software development is largely driven by ideological purity rather than feature parity. Mainstream users see Free Software people as irrelevant kooks, and thus easy to dismiss, which is why Free Software has so utterly failed as a movement.
>You know, the FSF would probably argue that our computing habits are the peculiar one.
I'm sure flat-earthers feel that my belief that earth is an oblate spheroid is peculiar, too. Of what relevance is that to anyone?
>And unless you can tell me about the code your iPhone runs in detail, they're probably (albeit begrudgingly) correct.
We'll have to agree to disagree. The emacs developers don't even understand how large chunks of emacs work (per emacs-devel), for example. There's too much software out there for one person to keep in their head. This is not a reasonable heuristic.
> Indeed, because free software development is largely driven by ideological purity rather than feature parity.
This "ideological purity" didn't come out of nothing, it came out of the very practical issue of who is in control. People forget that RMS came up with the whole thing because he wanted to fix a broken printer and was denied the source code that could help him fix the issue.
He wasn't siting in some ivory tower coming up with abstract philosophical questions, he was in some lab and had an actual practical problem he wanted to fix.
> Indeed, because free software development is largely driven by ideological purity rather than feature parity.
Ideological purity is a valuable thing. Look at Minix, hell, even look at the BSDs today. These are projects that have collapsed because of their feature obsession and ignorance of ideology. The differentiation of ideology is what makes free software uniquely successful - it is the feature.
> Mainstream users see Free Software people as irrelevant kooks, and thus easy to dismiss, which is why Free Software has so utterly failed as a movement.
Mainstream users don't think about Free Software at all. They certainly use it though. They rely on it, to provide and maintain the runtime their cell phone and iPad and router all depend on. It probably runs an RTOS on their grandpa's CPAP machine, it probably occupies the DVR for their cable TV and it's likely running on their games console and personal computer, too.
Free software is even more inescapable than proprietary software. If users cared enough to understand the difference, you and I both know they would accuse the businesses of being the irrelevant kooks. Not a single "maintream user" I know would defend Apple or Google or Microsoft's business practices as software companies. No one.
> I'm sure flat-earthers feel that my belief that earth is an oblate spheroid is peculiar, too. Of what relevance is that to anyone?
As the other comment suggested, this is both an insincere response and one where you are the flat earther here. The FSF has reasons that they hold the principles they do, and you haven't refuted any of their ideology. You are the guy lambasting Gallileo, and when Gallileo asks you why heliocentrism offends you, you are replying "because the mainstream clergy sees you as kooks." It's not a response at all.
> The emacs developers don't even understand how large chunks of emacs work
Nobody is so stupid that we expect every kernel dev to understand the whole of the kernel. It's folly, and not what I was asking anyways. Nobody at Apple understands how the entirety of iOS works either, but that's not an implication that it's inherently insecure. What makes the FSF balk at Apple is the inaccountability. The lack of reason associated with their statements asserting the privacy and security of a system that sues it's auditors.
If you have a more reasonable heuristic to suggest, I'm all ears.
>You are the guy lambasting Gallileo, and when Gallileo asks you why heliocentrism offends you, you are replying "because the mainstream clergy sees you as kooks."
I'm lambasting the people who think this fictional Galileo is a good public persona to lead their political movement, because this Galileo can't convince anyone of anything because he is almost entirely devoid of the skills one needs to advance a political cause even if Galileo might have written some good C code 45 years ago.
>If users cared enough to understand the difference, you and I both know they would accuse the businesses of being the irrelevant kooks. Not a single "maintream user" I know would defend Apple or Google or Microsoft's business practices as software companies. No one.
I can see we have irreconcilable differences. I find this statement ludicrous.
I know lots of people who understand what free software is and choose to make a living selling proprietary software.
> I know lots of people who understand what free software is and choose to make a living selling proprietary software.
That's not what I asked you, though. Do those same people defend Microsoft and Google and Apple's business strategies? Do they respect what the apex of proprietary software looks like, replete with advertising, data collection, vaporware promises, removed features, integrated spyware and mandatory junk fees? Unless your friends are an LLM, I suspect they don't, because they've been burned before and know better. As no serious economist promotes laissez faire economics in the 21st century, laissez faire software is not healthy for humans either. The abuses are right in front of us, and the blame is simple to dole out.
It's for your own good that you stop replying to my comments if you're going to twist my words and avoid the topic. Free software isn't bound by the pragmatic demands of a market, and yes, that means that it can fail, but it can also end up displacing entire product categories as well. Anyone familiar with the past 3 decades of computing history knows this to be an irrevocable and proven fact. We would not be having this conversation on the internet if proprietary networking standards prevailed over open ones.
The flat earthers are the people dismissing the concerns of the FSF though.
(The Earth being round doesn't directly matter in practice to most people. It does have inevitable consequences though.)
Or perhaps a better example is anthropogenic climate change : here too the implications are extremely inconvenient for most people, so denial is rampant.
The FSF has turned into the crazy old aunt that insists you unplug the coffee pot after use in case it's bugged. It's taken me a long time to come around to the reality that they are holding Linux back at every juncture, probably still salty over the GNU/drama.
Modern TPM support in Linux and systemD now permits automatic disk unlock for LUKS encrypted volumes using a key stored in the TPM - some ~15 years after Windows could do it.
I wonder what the TPM support is like in the HURD - ha!
The only complaint I have about the TPM is there is no standardisation in connectors, pinout, or bus type when it's not soldered onto the board. I have three motherboards with plug-in TPMs and each required a different, unique part that was difficult to source.
While I broadly agree, I think it’s worth pointing out that they have made some compromises for practicality, the inclusion of MP3 software before patents had expired comes to mind.
We have had "FDE" and secure boot with TPM in higher-than-commercial (defense) and the higher end of commercial settings for Linux, BSD, and illumos since TPM 1.2 was available, and I'd have to dig in some places to confirm but probably before Windows did in actual practice anywhere (let alone officially).
Yeah, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, etc didn't have this, but as the saying goes: you get what you pay for. Although enough of the Gentoo users (the real Gentoo users) have such a thing had it around that time too, if they wanted it (and they tend to put together what they want).
Some essential context: if you think the "Linux community" is elitist, wait until you see the niche commercial (and higher) players. I'm probably an example of such, to be fair.
> there is no standardisation in connectors, pinout, or bus type when it's not soldered onto the board. I have three motherboards with plug-in TPMs and each required a different, unique part that was difficult to source.
It certainly has, and they have repented themselves of killing Windows Phone, turns out that when one wants to push stuff like AI and XBox ecosystem, having 10% market share is way better than not having none at all.
Then again, they have been so busy with Azure and XBox profits, that Windows development has turned into a mess, of GUI teams fighting for resources, while the apps division couldn't care less, now filled with people that grown up using UNIX instead of Windows, and see Web UIs everywhere.
Hence why Windows might be my main desktop, yet I eventually returned into Web/distributed computing world, disappointed with how UWP/WinRT development turned out.
> It's disappointing to me because the FSF could be so much more influential today
I mean, open source advocacy already includes both business-friendly convenience-focused pragmatists and social-friendly, principled advocates of digital freedom who were essentially turned off by RMS's personality and/or approach.
Taken together, their work seems like it sets a reasonable ceiling on what FSF-- or any freedom-based organization-- could achieve.
If I'm wrong I'd like to know what exactly the FSF could have achieved in your opinion that's above that ceiling, as well as the tactics they'd have use to get there.
It's been very clear to me for many years that the FSF is staffed by a bunch of out-of-touch boomers who believe that Microsoft is the end-all be-all of evil tech. That was probably true 30 years ago, but from their rhetoric, they've ignored how the computing landscape has changed. Namely, the ways smartphones are walled gardens that screw over people, often in the same ways Microsoft has. I've heard them mention in passing that Apple, Google, and Facebook are bad, but the volume of material directed at Microsoft overwhelms anything else. To the FSF, if it doesn't happen on a PC, its not a priority. It still amazes me that they're hurt over Linux stealing their GNU name/tools/momentum, but hardly a word is written about how Google stole Linux to make Android, and how the Android ecosystem is a complete betrayal of free software's values.
This sounds 100% on-brand for the FSF. The FSF's primary public-facing persona has peculiar computing habits so far removed from the mainstream that it's likely he has absolutely no clue how the real world works.
In fact by his own statement he has to rely on volunteers to update his website.
It's disappointing to me because the FSF could be so much more influential today, but the cult of personality around RMS has really destroyed their public credibility among "normies", the most important demographic to convince.
When the FSF finally realizes that a political organization such as theirs needs a public face with charisma and social skills, it will be too late.