Jul 3, 2026, 2:25 PM@tante @ansuz critically, that original vision of empowerment presumed *everyone* was self-motivated to learn how computers work at a low level, which is why the actual work done by GNU and *BSD, i.e. "reimplement Unix", could fulfill that vision ... for the (in fact quite small) group of people who actually were thus self-motivated
a group quite small not just due to enthusiasm or other inherently distinguishing personal characteristics, but who had sufficient access to computers of any kind whatsoever at the time
I keep taking tries at this point, but something I saw recently and need again to dig out puts it very well:
The spread of computing has been effected through a bait-and-switch, selling it as if commodification were somehow inherently democratizing.
Over my lifetime-to-date we've gone from having even a single 8-bit microcomputer in a middle-class home was a weird, niche thing, to obligatory compute ubiquity for most daily activities regardless of one's interest or desire.
This has been, historically speaking, extraordinary. But people tend not to acknowledge it, let alone account for it.
Jul 4, 2026, 4:31 PM@idlestate @tante @ansuz you're absolutely right but *also* I think there really was an "if we build it they will come" expectation among the early free software pioneers -- an expectation that computers would become more widespread and that this would *of itself* cause more people to become hackers, without any effort on their part put into making that an attractive prospect. all they had to do was make the *capability* of hacking software available to anyone who could afford the hardware.
Jul 4, 2026, 4:33 PM@idlestate @tante @ansuz this goes some way to explain what little the FSF *has* done since 1997 -- the preoccupation with making firmware replaceable and source-available, with end-user notices that software *can in principle* be modified, etc.
Jul 4, 2026, 5:00 PM@idlestate @tante @ansuz ...and this also goes some way to explain why the bait and switch went so smoothly
like, a lot of nerds' reaction to google making android more of a walled garden is "but you can just install calyx/graphene/lineage/..." despite that that's really not an option for most people AND doing that doesn't make the walls completely go away (it is a nontrivial problem for me that I can't spend money via the play store) AND those projects only exist on google's sufferance
My point, to a first approximation, whether you're right or not, is that it doesn't matter.
No one at the heart of FOSS, now, or ever, had anything approaching the resources and influence on the rise of ubiquitous computing and the shape it took as those in computing outside of or peripheral to FOSS.
Gates and Jobs everyone knew, and many still do. But that FSF guy? Or the kernel guy? What? No. Totally in the noise for most computer users, and often no more than a curiosity even to many devs.
They never slew Goliath. It was all they could do not to rack themselves up with the sling every time they took a swing.
The responsibility many of us try to pin on them is a measure of our disappointment and disillusionment much more than in what was ever really within their, or our, reach, whether what they oversold was "ethics" or "quality". It's very inside baseball.
For what influence there was, it was always fractured, from the earliest days of copyleft onward, long before "open source" even.
They rose just high enough in relevance to be consumed by the big fish.
I mean, seriously? IBM was a tentacled horror from the deep when Microsoft was the upstart! Let alone when it ate Redhat that had eaten Cygnus that had commercialized the GNU build tools.
who even knows about Cygnus any more?
it's not like they ever had an open field and just fumbled it. It was always a long shot, and it took some very weird and unreasonable people to achieve even as much as they did.