This seems to be arguing that because GNU stuff takes such a strong view on user agency that it doesn’t work with the hardware you already have because that hardware doesn’t support user agency that it therefore doesn’t care about your agency.
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say ‘I don’t care about user agency’, since you’ve bought hardware that won’t allow you agency over it.
I think that me caring about your agency means that I should allow you to change the software I give you to work with non-free components, but it doesn’t mean that I should have to do anything else at all for you beyond that. People who care about GNU ideals care about giving you rights over the software you run, not ensuring you can do the maximum number of things possible for minimum effort with it.
There is a pragmatic / idealistic slant of course - you can compromise to get your ‘cares about user agency’ code in as many hands as possible, including those who have hardware that doesn’t support user agency, or you can take an idealistic view and refuse to compromise.
Which of those choices is the right one can come down to an ethical difference, deontology vs utilitarianism, or analysis based on the relative power of the community that cares about user agency vs not.
These arguments all end up very philosophical. It reminds me of the ‘freedom from’ vs ‘freedom to’ debate. Is someone truly free if they live somewhere that there is no law restricting them from doing what they want to do, but because of lack of money their practical choices are in fact extremely limited? Is a country that allows slavery more free (because it has fewer laws restricting slavery) or less free (because it has slaves)?
I think the point the author was making is a little more nuanced than you are suggesting. GNU projects have a history of actively sabotaging your agency because of their ideology. Sometimes sabotaging an individuals agency can increase overall agency in a society. Laws against theft, assault, or murder for instance increase overall user agency at the expense of reducing agency in some individuals so as a society we corporately agree to them. Laws against slavery are generally understood to increase freedom overall in a society even though it is at the expense of decreasing a slave owners freedom to own slaves.
The GNU project however sabotages your agency without increasing overall societal agency. I can get the same level of agency they provide with software on Ubuntu or Debian without sabotaging my agency in other areas. This makes GNU distros self-defeating. Ubuntu is more effective at achieving GNUs ends than Guix is simply because they don’t actively sabotage my agency without offering any further societal gain.
The further societal gain is a popular distribution without nonfree blobs, driving more people to buy Guix-compatible hardware and so increase usage of libre-compatible hardware and software.
Except as a real world practical matter that is not actually happening at a level high enough to provide any real gain because Guix has little to no actual leverage in the market because Nix and Ubuntu exist. The market created by Guix is too small and is not likely to grow.
Not likely to grow? I remember that same rhetoric when I was buying an X200 to install Libreboot in my teens and now we have libre android phones and libre open-hardware laptops. Guix is another part of the general effort, and that effort has seen relatively massive and demonstrable gains over the past n years.
I disagree that Guix is part of that effort. I would more characterize those advancements as happening in spite of the GNU project. But at this point we have devolved into pure opinion and values so I don’t think the rest of the conversation will be productive.
If your problem is that not many people use Guix because it forces you to use free software, then I direct you to the root comment’s discussion of practicality vs idealism. The FSF can’t help it if you decide not to use free software-compatible hardware, that’s your prerogative. They aren’t limiting your agency by failing to immediately reverse engineer and write free drivers for every new piece of hardware the day it comes out. This is ridiculously unreasonable.
Sure, you can get the same level of “agency” on Debian and Ubuntu but only if you install binary blobs or proprietary software. And if you don’t have any hardware that requires those, or don’t require any non-free software, then you have nothing to complain about with GNU, because GNU will work just fine for you!
You do understand how you can’t simultaneously say “GNU limits my agency by not letting me install binary blobs” and “so therefore I will instead use Debian or Ubuntu without binary blobs which is just as free as GNU!”, right? Either you believe using proprietary software is necessary to your “agency” or you don’t. You sound like you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too.
And I’m confused in general about the point of your argument from redundance against Guix’s existence. There are a million GNU/Linux distros. This is par for the course.
The market created by Guix is too small and is not likely to grow.
Sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy: if everyone believes that, nobody will make the effort required for the market to actually grow. A tragedy of the commons of sorts.
The GNU project however sabotages your agency without increasing overall societal agency.
You don’t believe that society in general is more free because the linux kernel is GPL than it would have been if it had been MIT? I do.
And that’s even accepting the premise that the GNU project sabotages your agency. I don’t accept that premise because I don’t see how someone offering me a piece of software for free that I can modify at will can ever be said to reduce my agency, even if it does some things in ways I disagree with. I still have agency to use something else or change it to work the way I want it to. I don’t have agency to demand that the people I got it from do things the way I want them to, because that would be reducing their agency.
Oh certainly. But the linux kernel is not Guix and the bulk of that freedom has less to do with the GNU project itself than Linus. You could easily imagine him using a different license if the GPL hadn’t existed. I’ll give them credit for creating the license for him to use but nearly all of their distro work doesn’t fall into the same bucket.
But the GNU project did a lot more than create a license… it created a culture and the tools (like gcc and most of a complete Unix userspace) that made it possible for Linus to create Linux and release it under the GPL! Nowadays you can build a Linux-based OS with mostly or all non-GNU userspace, but that wasn’t true then and for many years afterward. Gcc and the associate tools provided a tremendous amount of “agency” to people who wanted to create free (or Open Source) software because Open Source doesn’t do anyone any good if you can’t build it. With the GNU tools available on pretty much any Unix-like platform and many others besides authors of Free Software could have the confidence that other people would be able to build the cord they distributed.
Laws against slavery are generally understood to increase freedom overall in a society even though it is at the expense of decreasing a slave owners freedom to own slaves.
The better argument for slavery (devil’s advocate, obviously) is being able to sell yourself into slavery - or perhaps more realistically, offer yourself as collateral for a loan - because of course you’re going to pay back that loan, and it makes the investment safer from the lender’s side, thereby increasing the amount of money people are willing to lend. Blah blah blah, lubrication of innovation. In theory, it makes a lot of sense.
The argument against this is basically that society will squeeze whatever it can get from the poor, and once a new floor becomes an option it quickly becomes effectively mandatory, thus making it only nominally an actual freedom. Although, this transition of real choices into hobson’s choices is often rationalized by accusations of laziness or economic benefit (reducing worker wages will reduce the cost of goods, so the money you lose will come back to you, if it successfully travels through the entire rest of the economy without striking major market-distortions anywhere) rather than a plan for increasing real choices actually ever being planned.
Note that the lesser argument is still being used today with respect to permissive licences vs copyleft.
The idea is simple: permissive licences are more free because because you can do whatever you want with the software you got with it. Copyleft is less free because you can’t make a proprietary product out of the free software you just got.
Pointing out that the only freedom copyleft takes from you is the freedom to restrict the freedom of your users is not enough. Permissive weenies still cling to the idea that their negative freedom is more important, and that’s what “freedom” should mean. (Now I’m ignoring the very real problem of licence incompatibilities, but you get the idea.)
since you’ve bought hardware that won’t allow you agency over it.
OK, now replace “bought” with “inherited” or “accepted a donation of”. One of the supposed strengths of free software is that you don’t have to buy new machines to get stuff done; you can just repurpose hardware that would otherwise be discarded.
Or “salvaged from a dumpster”. Which is how I got a couple of my early Linux boxes.
Thanks for emphasizing this angle.
I have no objection to things like keeping non-free drivers out of the “pure” distribution repositories. Though I feel strongly that it should only require minimal hoop-jumping to use those.
Removing the ability of the kernel to load microcode updates seems a bridge too far, though, IMO. I don’t think it’s serving freedom in any capacity to do that.
The whole point of the article is that GNU doesn’t support user agency. They are actively preventing you from doing what you want with your own hardware.
As for the freedom to have slaves vs not having slaves, that is a nonsense argument as it is simply a variant of the “tolerance paradox”.
I think your definition of the word active is somewhat misaligned with the dictionary definition. If they’re stopping you from using your hardware how you want to, it is by inaction. They haven’t been able to reverse engineer and write open source firmware and drivers for every piece of hardware on the planet. If this is the case for your hardware, it is not GNU’s fault that the maker of your hardware decided to limit your agency by locking down the firmware and making it proprietary; it’s the manufacturer’s fault for caring more about their profits than their users. If you’re using such hardware, it is not GNU’s fault that you don’t have agency; it’s literally your own fault for buying hardware that limits your agency.
But here’s the fun part – no one is forcing you to use such hardware, and even if you choose to, no one is forcing you to use GNU, so even if your argument made sense, GNU still isn’t limiting your agency in the slightest! Just use proprietary software. It’s just that it would be cool if you didn’t pretend that gave you more agency. I have proprietary BIOS; I have proprietary wireless drivers. My hardware is incompatible with coreboot et al, and my wireless card has no libre replacement drivers. But that’s not a good thing. I’m not going to pretend that’s a beautiful expression of user agency or whatever. My inability to inspect, modify, or use my own machine in any way other than that proscribed by a few billion dollar corporations is in fact not a good thing and does in fact limit my agency. It isn’t GNU’s fault that I can’t make my machine fully libre. It’s unfortunate, but I need a laptop, and I just can’t use an x220 or whatever for my job.
The FSF merely telling me that it would be better not to use proprietary blobs and drivers and firmware does not limit my freedom.
I disagree with this take. I believe that the software freedom movement needs a diverse spectrum of proponents with differing determination to enforce freedoms. We need absolutists like Richard Stallman and we need convenient but somewhat compromised distros like Ubuntu. Ultimately, if everyone thinks that Richard Stallman goes too far and uses Ubuntu instead, then GNU/Linux has almost entirely taken over, so it’s a win for the software freedom movement after all. The GNU philosophy shifts the overton window radically into the direction of software freedom, and even though their viewpoint may be extreme to some, this makes the Ubuntu user a moderate, which is a good thing. Remember: You are all on the same side, it’s just the extent of the goal that differs. After all, you would use fully open hardware and software over the proprietary stuff if it was just as affordable, reliable and available. Your problem is not the GNU philosophy, your problem is that the proprietary stuff is simply too desirable, so you compromise on your morals to get the technology you need. There’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t blame GNU for it.
I’d say the core problem is that the FSF (and by extension the GNU project) suck all the air out of the room while being solidly stuck in the past. They’ve completely ignored the reality of the modern age with companies like Amazon existing as they do. Sure it’s truly “free” to release something under the GPL then have Amazon take it, make some small changes, then host it. They’re allowed to under the GPL as they should be, but that seems like it goes against the principles of the FSF, GNU, and the GPL. The AGPL isn’t air tight, it’s sure as hell better than most other licenses and I personally use it, but we need better. We need a group focusing on the issues of the modern age.
We need a group who are focusing on the current issues with hardware and software freedom. Proprietary SaaS services and modern hardware. It’s all fine and good making sure your shell, editor, and kernel are truly free. But if they can’t run on hardware most users can actually get or need what’s the point? Most users can’t or aren’t willing to use an almost 15 year old Thinkpad as their one and only machine. Most users can’t run Replicant, they need access to Google Play Services and proprietary apps to actually live their life.
We need a group providing aid and resources to tackle these problems. Tools, training, equipment, and materials to help reverse engineer hardware and software. Very few people have the knowledge, ability, and free time to reverse engineer modern hardware, what if we had more? How many fewer binary blobs and proprietary drivers would we need if we actually focused on getting rid of the need for them rather than trying to pretend we don’t need them? Wouldn’t it be great if we had licenses for modern problems like cloud providers modifying, extending, and hosting services without providing the source.
Absolutism has it’s place, that’s for sure, but how do we actually get to that absolutist’s position? It requires work that the FSF and GNU just aren’t focusing on. And they hold their position while trying to be seen as the one true group who can deliver us to that position. Maybe another group needs to come along and actually do the work, but it’s hard with the FSF/GNU in the room.
They’ve completely ignored the reality of the modern age with companies like Amazon existing as they do.
Would Amazon (and other _aaS providers) be the behemoths they are today if people had stuck with GNU/FSF principles? Would there be such a great demand for their services if new developers had been brought up in a culture where you were both expected to know and have access to the internal of your software and share your work?
And they hold their position while trying to be seen as the one true group who can deliver us to that position.
That is rather the advantage of taking an uncompromising absolutist stance…by stubborn refusal to compromise it is much easier to make the claim that they are the one true group and that their approach optimizes for their ideology and minimizes change of corruption. The last…six?…years have shown that the slippery slope fallacy seldom is.
We need a group who are focusing on the current issues with hardware and software freedom. Proprietary SaaS …
We need a group providing aid and resources to tackle these problems. Tools, training, equipment, and materials to help reverse engineer hardware and software. Very few people have the knowledge, ability, and free time to reverse engineer modern hardware, what if we had more?
This analysis is a bit wishful in that it totally ignores economics (the root problem). Let’s say we had a group such as you describe, where are the incentives? where is the funding? why won’t this “pure” group immediately get outpaced by the group that forms around it to exploit the contradiction between the current economic system and the fiction you propose. The latter group would likely become relatively big quickly (size depending on the competence of the former group).
I think we need a new economic system. We measure the wrong things and as a result we compete to make the wrong numbers go up. Who cares about the exact score of a passing grade? or how many jurors were unsure in a “not guilty” verdict? consider the phrase “fuck you money”, what does it mean? … From what I can tell; we would not have a (a priori) global (reserve) currency in a truly decentralized system, there cannot be a central coordinator, so we cannot have a (postulated) global currency. At best it’ll be emergent from the reputation system we end up with.
What I worry about is that the software that gets built is the software that gets used. All the FOSS world lending a helping hand with better contact tracing software (instead of communication software, which is just as needed in a pandemic that may go on for an indeterminate amound of time) is a symptom of this problem. We need to be smarter about our priorities or we will end up running our governments and “citizen points” (a.k.a. “how to wealth distribute” from pov of gov) on some chinese system “because it exists” … please let’s not have that happen.
2000s problem: my word processor is proprietary, costs a lot, and uses proprietary file formats that I’m required to use for everything, so I’m stuck paying egregious prices to an evil monopoly.
2020s problem: my word processor is a free web app that supports open standards and runs on any web browser and any operating system, so that’s great, but I’m still locked in to a proprietary ecosystem because only a few mega-corporations can afford the massive expense of creating and running such a thing.
It’s a different set of problems and will require different solutions.
Agreed. Obviously there’s a lot of nuance, but I think this is a big part of the problem. I also tend to think that the solutions are no longer as technical as they once were. In the 80s and 90s it was pretty clear that what was needed was to write a bunch of software to replace the proprietary software that existed. But today, that’s a whole lot less effective because running the software is now nearly as complicated as writing the software because we want everything to be always-online, but GNU doesn’t seem to have a viable plan for that.
At some point I want to write an article on this exact problem. The title would be “it’s the economy, stupid” and I seriously wonder whether I would actually need to write the body.
Consider a situation like wanting to play an online game together with friends, but through Facts and Circumstances you have an Nvidia GPU and the game is on Steam with no open source option. If you are using a fully open source operating system with no capacity to install Steam or the Nvidia drivers, you are screwed and thus your freedom to use your computer how you want is severely limite
This paragraph is really funny to me because it reveals a stunning lack of understanding of the problems free software is intended to solve and just generally of the topic at hand in their own article. It turns out the FSF’s definition of freedom is somewhat different than “being able to play the greatest number of games possible”.
Wow, thanks, I’m cured. My wifi card magically stopped existing and now everything is happy unicorns farting out rainbows that spawn free puppies and everything is saved forever.
Again, that doesn’t help me with the situation that my wifi card doesn’t work and I as a user want it to even though making it work will require proprietary firmware.
Okay, then buy a different wi-fi card. Stop trying to use something designed to be incompatible with your proprietary hardware and then getting mad about it not being supported.
Are you offering to pay for it? Aren’t we all supposed to be out there installing Linux for our friends and relatives to save them from… well, something? Most of those people already have computers that require compromises.
Then install a distro that does that? GNU Guix is one of literally dozens of active and we’ll maintained distros for people to choose from. Guix System is for people who choose to be uncompromising in their free software stance (with exceptions of course). Would they like for more people to be uncompromising? Yes. Until that day comes is anyone forced to use guix as a Linux distro? No, not at all.
Their argument is that self-advertised “libre” distributions not only reduce both user agency and total value to the user (including materially important things like security), but also they’re advertised as increasing user agency, when they don’t. Neither of those problems are solved if you, personally, don’t use Guix, because it’ll still sucker in some people who believe the marketing. The problem isn’t just that Guix doesn’t do the thing, it’s that it’s marketed as doing the thing.
So, amend the marketing, or change Guix to actually respect user freedom - just don’t keep lying.
The whole point of this article is to show that while guix claims to be absolutely dedicated to increasing user agency they deliberately remove the ability for a user to use their computer as they want.
Obviously people can use other distros but that isn’t the point. The point is that guix is explicitly doing the opposite of what they claim to be doing.
I agree, that’s a reasonable stance. That’s actually why I use a Mac, because I got sick of using software that wasn’t designed to work with my hardware :-)
This is a really user-hostile response. What if I’m a lifelong Windows user who now wants to try Linux? What if I’m low-income and don’t want to spend the money on purchasing a libre wifi card, or the time to do research on it? What if I’m a gamer who wants my software to be more free than it is, but isn’t a free-software zealot? What if I want wifi 6 and don’t want to spend hours looking for a card with free drivers, or days writing my own?
Stop trying to use something designed to be incompatible with your proprietary hardware and then getting mad about it not being supported.
You misunderstand their arguments. They’re not complaining about the existence of a distro that doesn’t allow them to install proprietary software; they’re complaining that it’s marketed as increasing user freedom, when it clearly does not, and that the community actively invests effort in making it harder to learn about things that would provide value to the user.
I don’t think it is hostile, no. It’s not hostile to tell someone “the thing you have isn’t compatible with what we’re doing”, it’s a statement of fact. If you’re low-income, that’s unfortunate and you’ll have to stick to using not-guix until your hardware is compatible. If you’re not a “free software zealot”, go ahead and use something else or install the nonfree guix repos. If you want wifi 6, you’ll have to use something compatible with wifi 6. It’s not their goal to be compatible with every possible use case.
Guix is not marketed as increasing user freedom. That’s silly. It’s marketed as respecting your freedoms.
Liberating. Guix is an advanced distribution of the GNU operating system developed by the GNU Project—which respects the freedom of computer users.
It’s not the Guix project’s job to tell you about all the wonderful software that goes against their core values. That’s antithetical to the mission of replacing proprietary software with libre software.
But wait, isn’t there that one nonguix project that allows you to install a normal kernel and Steam?
Yeah, but talk about that in the main #guix channel and you risk getting banned. GG. You just have to know that it exists and you can’t learn that it exists without knowing someone that tells you that it exists under the table.
Has this actually happened? Getting banned for talking about nonguix?
Not sure about getting banned, per se, but it’s explicitly discouraged. The second paragraph of nonguix’s readme:
Please do NOT promote this repository on any official Guix
communication channels, such as their mailing lists or IRC channel, even in
response to support requests! This is to show respect for the Guix project’s
strict policy
against recommending nonfree software, and to avoid any unnecessary hostility.
I would recommend actually reading the help-guix archives to see how often support issues are created and how many issues users have are ignored or told they are out of place.
I admit I fucked up and misunderstood the rules. My complaint now reads:
Yeah, but talk about that in the main #guix channel and you get told to not talk about it. You just have to know that it exists and you can’t learn that it exists without knowing someone that tells you that it exists under the table, like some kind of underground software drug dealer giving you a hit of wifi card firmware. This means that knowledge of the nonguix project (which may contain tools that make it possible to use Guix at all) is hidden from users that may
need it because it allows users to install proprietary software. This limits user freedom from being able to use their computer how they want by making it a potentially untrustable underground software den instead of something that can be properly handled upstream without having to place trust in too many places.
Hehe, yeah, the FSF and SFC use outrage constantly! I get emails all the time telling me that Microsoft and Apple are teaming up to murder babies or whatever. It’s pretty much all they have left at this point, and I say this as someone who donated and generally supported their mission for many, many years (which is why I still get the emails).
When I wrote that bit I made the assumption that violating the rules of the channel could get you banned. I admit that it looks wrong in hindsight, so I am pushing a commit to amend it.
I must say that I like Artemis’ reply. The GNU-Free distributions do fill a purpose, a niche that explores how much can actually be done with only freely available code.
But they aren’t advertised as “see how much can be done” niche experiments, they’re advertised as “The Only Option For Freedom™ And If You Use Something Else You’re A Sellout”.
I remember I was once at a talk by that now unpopular person and they were asked what OS they run, and replied “I don’t want to tell you because it’s not a good one. You should use Trisquel”…
If they are not sold that way, they’d not be championed as realistic options for humans. They’d fill fascinating roles, along such operating systems as Haiku and Plan 9.
I don’t have time for the actual outcomes that GNU has played a hand in, but while this is a pretty good rant, it’s something of a category mistake to complain about the GNU project not playing well with closed source hardware. That’s … the point?
Agency is not the same thing as control. Free Software is not just about positive empowerment, but also removing proprietary control.
If their goal is really to liberate users and make it easy for them to have control over what their computer is doing, they should make it trivial to escape hatch into a less “pure” setup without having to install third party repositories that you just have to know about or sidestepping the upstream update process to install your own system software.
Rephrasing: if their goal is user liberation, then they should make it easy for users to add proprietary controls to their environment. But this is a clear contradiction, since proprietary control is a limitation on user agency.
My wifi card magically stopped existing and now everything is happy unicorns farting out rainbows that spawn free puppies and everything is saved forever. [The defective-by-design argument] doesn’t help me with the situation that my wifi card doesn’t work and I as a user want it to even though making it work will require proprietary firmware.
It doesn’t require proprietary firmware. It requires a driver. The driver could be authored by anybody with time, patience, a piece of hardware, and the programming manual. Being angry at the Free Software community for not producing the programming manual is misdirection; it wasn’t their obligation.
Ubuntu gives the user more agency about how they want to use their computer than fully libre GNU/Linux distros ever can.
And distros based on ports trees, from Gentoo to NixOS, are even more empowering, since they lower the discussed adoption barriers even further.
Agency is not the same thing as control. Free Software is not just about positive empowerment, but also removing proprietary control.
That’s a euphemistic way to say “there’s also an intentional reduction in user freedom/agency/control along a specific axis”.
Rephrasing: if their goal is user liberation, then they should make it easy for users to add proprietary controls to their environment. But this is a clear contradiction, since proprietary control is a limitation on user agency.
There is no contradiction. “Making it easy for a user to add proprietary controls to their environment” increases user liberation, period - the claim that this translates to a limitation on user agency is a fallacy. There may be a self-imposed limitation on user agency if the user then decides to exercise this right to add a proprietary control, but that’s a choice the user has - therefore, a freedom, or an agency, if you will, and certainly not one the user is forced into.
It doesn’t require proprietary firmware. It requires a driver.
How is this relevant to the article? Is the argument materially changed by s/firmware/driver/?
The driver could be authored by anybody with time, patience, a piece of hardware, and the programming manual. Being angry at the Free Software community for not producing the programming manual is misdirection; it wasn’t their obligation.
This is a misdirection itself - the anger is directed at the community for intentionally making it difficult or impossible to install proprietary software or coordinate doing so - if you read just a few sentences up, you’ll see “talk about that in the main #guix channel and you get told to not talk about it”. This actively requires more work on the side of the #guix channel users than not saying anything at all.
Nobody is asking for open-source programmers to do anything for free here - the issues are (1) FSF’s misleading use of terms like “freedom” when they actively restrict user freedom by making it difficult to install various kinds of proprietary software and (2) some parts of the community that buy into the FSF’s ideology doing similar things.
“Making it easy for a user to add proprietary controls to their environment” increases user liberation, period
This isn’t the dunk you think it is. From the perspective of a free software purist the user is less liberated from the grasp of proprietary software when they are encouraged to and supported in their use of proprietary software.
I wasn’t trying to be coy or euphemistic. Suppose we have two different ports trees of Free Software. Despite neither tree’s contents adding controls to its users, the different capabilities available to users of the two different trees reflect a difference in agency: the users are free to install different packages.
Hardware does not require proprietary firmware, in general. Certainly, the typical WiFi chipset does not. Rather, proprietary firmware is one possible way of configuring the hardware. My favorite vendor to use as an illustration is nVidia, whose GPUs can either be driven with proprietary firmware over an nVidia-only interface, or with reverse-engineered firmware over common interfaces.
Seems like everytime Xe tries guix they comes back with a worse take.
The first time I can remember is when they couldn’t use tramp on guix. The problem there was Doom Emacs handled a quirk about tramping into NixOS but at the time didn’t handle that same quirk that is also true of Guix. Because they wasn’t aware that doom did this for them, they just assumed Guix was broken and ranted about it then.
This time they’re ranting about GNU and I can’t help but assume it’s in anger at another attempt at using Guix that went badly. They include a conversation about having to do extra steps to use the nonguix channel and says that she will get “banned” for talking about nonfree software. But that just isn’t true. I’m on the guix mailing list and the irc and the most I’ve ever seen happen to someone is they get told to please not discuss or promote nonfree software and the conversation moves on. I’m pretty sure they only “ban” for spamming or being a jerk and that’s only after a generously numerous amount warnings.
Maybe they should stop trying to use Guix as a distribution and focus on using it as a package manager/devops tool. Then in the world of virtual machines or whatever they can chill the fuck out. That is if they fixed their tramp woes.
I’m uncomfortable with the way the discussion here (and in some respect the original post, but mostly the discussion) seems to constantly jump between talking about decisions of the Guix project specifically, the whole GNU project, or even the FSF and the SFC. All of these entities have done things in the past that one may disagree with, but the discussion feels like somehow the Guix developers/maintainers/contributors where exactly the same people who made decisions you dislike about that other GNU project (GCC? Emacs? who knows), or the FSF, Stallman, etc. They’re quite probably not!
When I read stuff like
I’d say the core problem is that the FSF (and by extension the GNU project) suck all the air out of the room while being solidly stuck in the past. […] Absolutism has it’s place, that’s for sure, but how do we actually get to that absolutist’s position? It requires work that the FSF and GNU just aren’t focusing on. And they hold their position while trying to be seen as the one true group who can deliver us to that position. Maybe another group needs to come along and actually do the work, but it’s hard with the FSF/GNU in the room.
Hehe, yeah, the FSF and SFC use outrage constantly!
I feel bad for the Guix contributors reading this, that somehow are held responsible for things wildly outside their control.
The original post is mostly talking about decisions from the Guix community itself (the default kernel, the policies about how to discuss non-free software for Guix, etc.), not other GNU projects or related organizations. I would encourage people to stick to this approach.
I agree with what you say except for this last bit about the original post. This post, when read carefully, was completely about Guix. At the same time the title and lead up to revealing what inspired this rant (Guix uses a libre kernel, and discourages discussion of proprietary software) did exactly what you said these comments are doing, conflating the guix project with other GNU and FSF stuff that ultimately are out of the project’s control.
I would love if people could talk about guix but not use that as a jumping off point to rant about the GNU or whoever they’re mad at.
I’m kind of confused regarding the CPU microcode updates. A microcode update is just that, an update for nonfree code that is already running on the machine, usually to make said system more secure. If they were really this serious about not allowing proprietary code of any kind to run on a machine, their default kernel should halt as soon as it detects a nonfree CPU with some sort of message. But I guess they don’t do that because it wouldn’t allow anyone to boot up the system…
As someone who used to run Parabola and run linux-libre I find myself agreeing with this rant pretty hard. Trying to use a hard line freedom distro rapidly became a major obstacle to getting anything I actually needed done.
I like free software but I really wish there were more people taking a practical approach (and doing so publicly) to fight against the prevailing FSF “too holy to talk about proprietary software” stance.
Better support for things like license filtering with easy to add exceptions and sandboxing to let people make their own choices on the degree of freedom they want rather than just trisquel vs debian vs ubuntu.
The counter-argument by Artemis goes like this: the availability of GNU-Free distros increases user agency because it gives Libre Enthusiast Strawpersons the ability to choose a GNU-Free distro that fits their needs better.
There are two problems here: one, the argument about whether the existence of GNU-Free distros increases user agency globally is different than the one in Xe’s post about how said distros decrease agency locally, for a user using the system - they’re separate levels of argument, and can both be true at the same time. (that is, I don’t think that the “response” post actually responds to the arguments in the original)
Two, the claim “In this case, a distribution that allows proprietary software actually decreases their agency.” is made, but there’s no supporting evidence - where is the decrease in agency?
There’s “I know that no matter what I do on my system, I’m not going to accidentally turn on the non-free repos.” but that’s not an increase in agency - it’s no-change at best, and still a decrease at worst. Those are safety rails - and safety is perpetually in tension with agency and freedom.
There’s “my distribution maintainers are designing with this in mind, so they’ll be more likely to actively look for free alternatives to proprietary software that other distributions might handwave on account of already providing a non-free option” but the existence or absence of software is an ecosystem problem, not a freedom problem (at least not in the sense of “what technical limitations does the system impose on me” (like preventing kernel blobs) that is the topic of discussion).
That is - the counter-post doesn’t name any kind of freedom or agency that is reduced by using a non-GNU-free distro, and half of their argument rests on that.
I feel like there must be some reasonable middle ground. IIRC, Debian has a very clear separation between free software and non-free software, doesn’t install non-free stuff by default, but if you decide you want non-free, you can toggle it on and gain the additional functionality. Having ethical defaults and making it clear when you’re compromising principles/hackability for some short-term usability benefit seems like a good way to maximize user empowerment.
Why exactly can’t GNU projects Guix act like Debian? (Or my understanding of Debian, if I’ve gotten that wrong.) Can someone explain like I’m five?
One of my top reasons for being passionate about FOSS is I am very worried about the climate crisis / ecological destruction, and I consider the right to repair + keeping old hardware functional to be vital to reducing energy use + e-waste. Refusing to interoperate with hardware produced by unscrupulous companies seems to me to interfere with my ethical commitments to fight climate change, insofar as it interferes with salvage computing and making more efficient use of the devices we have.
Well. There’s an unofficial guix channel called nonguix that packages some nonfree and binary software, particularly the mainline Linux kernel with all of its nonfree firmwareand Firefox nightly. They even recently started running a substitution server. The Guix manual and other resources gives you everything you need to know to add this channel. But there process of finding and addinf it are up to you. It isn’t discussed in any of the official guix channels or on the website. That’s probably as good as it’s going to get and it’s a solution that satisfies many guix users (myself included).
There is a solution in place, but the author isnt a fan.
What I’m trying to get a better understanding of is why hiding the solution is ethically necessary. What is the moral gain from having a hidden solution passed around under the table? It reminds me of security through obscurity… ethics through obscurity? nonguix is ethical so long as it’s hard to find? I find it unconvincing as an ethical strategy, but perhaps I’m misunderstanding or missing something.
Another way to approach this is, what would it take to convince the project to just be public and transparent about the existence of this compromise? What are there exact objections, and are there any possible ways to satisfy them without obscurity?
The “compromise” is unofficial. The Guix project proper doesn’t have anything to be up front about because non guix isn’t a GNU project. As far as moral gains go I believe you’re thinking too hard about it. GNU guix was made as a GNU project, it has been upfront about its stance on non free hardware. A user has the tools to add non free or proprietary software to their system but Guix doesn’t promote that use case.
Non guix as a project has goals to package things that will never be made available in the official guix channel. There’s some contributer overlap but ultimately it is it’s own entity.
I can be very uncompromising at times. For example, I hate cars, and when I had to move house, I decided to move house entirely by electric bicycle + cargo trailer. Exactly one car load traveled from my old apartment to my new house (in an electric car), everything else was hauled by bike. I learned a lot about moving heavy and bulky objects by bike, about the various biking routes through my city, and had some good times with friends who joined in to help with the bike caravan. Most of all, I proved that moving 11 miles uphill by bike was doable, given the right tools, and therefore shorter, flatter bicycle moves should be considered feasible.
Shortly after finishing the bike move, my family sold a house a few states away and wanted to give me some furniture from it. Aside from being exhausted, it was not practical to move the furniture that distance by bike (although I did travel to pack up that house using only trains + bicycles). My only choices were to risk the furniture being thrown out (a horrifying waste), or to accept a moving truck. This felt ironic after all of the effort I had just gone through to avoid using a moving van.
Did accepting a moving truck in the less ideal instance invalidate all of the work I’d put into avoiding cars in my bicycle move? Did it erase what I learned from the experience? Am I a bad person because I compromised that time, when I was able to be uncompromising before? No. The world is a better place in some small way because of my efforts, and if bike moves like mine can be replicated, improved, and scaled up, we might have a better chance of averting climate disaster. The measurable harm of the emissions from that moving truck are undeniable, and if our civilization wants to have a future, we’ll have to (re)learn how to move more stuff over longer distances with much less emissions / resource use. (Why couldn’t I book a container on a train to move house instead of a truck, for instance? Or on a sail cargo ship?) But it’s not right to pin our collective societal failure on me.
Compromising is just recognizing my limitations as an individual, or even as a small group of individuals. Solving collective problems requires collective action, and while experimenting with purism can be valuable in order to imagine a better future and learn how to build it, we need to be kind to ourselves in dealing with problems that all of humanity had a hand in creating. The issues are bigger than we are, and it is hubris to think we can solve them alone. Trying to do so is a recipe for burnout and personal suffering for only marginal gain, your efforts will be more sustainable and replicable if you can operate less painfully.
This seems to be arguing that because GNU stuff takes such a strong view on user agency that it doesn’t work with the hardware you already have because that hardware doesn’t support user agency that it therefore doesn’t care about your agency.
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say ‘I don’t care about user agency’, since you’ve bought hardware that won’t allow you agency over it.
I think that me caring about your agency means that I should allow you to change the software I give you to work with non-free components, but it doesn’t mean that I should have to do anything else at all for you beyond that. People who care about GNU ideals care about giving you rights over the software you run, not ensuring you can do the maximum number of things possible for minimum effort with it.
There is a pragmatic / idealistic slant of course - you can compromise to get your ‘cares about user agency’ code in as many hands as possible, including those who have hardware that doesn’t support user agency, or you can take an idealistic view and refuse to compromise.
Which of those choices is the right one can come down to an ethical difference, deontology vs utilitarianism, or analysis based on the relative power of the community that cares about user agency vs not.
These arguments all end up very philosophical. It reminds me of the ‘freedom from’ vs ‘freedom to’ debate. Is someone truly free if they live somewhere that there is no law restricting them from doing what they want to do, but because of lack of money their practical choices are in fact extremely limited? Is a country that allows slavery more free (because it has fewer laws restricting slavery) or less free (because it has slaves)?
I think the point the author was making is a little more nuanced than you are suggesting. GNU projects have a history of actively sabotaging your agency because of their ideology. Sometimes sabotaging an individuals agency can increase overall agency in a society. Laws against theft, assault, or murder for instance increase overall user agency at the expense of reducing agency in some individuals so as a society we corporately agree to them. Laws against slavery are generally understood to increase freedom overall in a society even though it is at the expense of decreasing a slave owners freedom to own slaves.
The GNU project however sabotages your agency without increasing overall societal agency. I can get the same level of agency they provide with software on Ubuntu or Debian without sabotaging my agency in other areas. This makes GNU distros self-defeating. Ubuntu is more effective at achieving GNUs ends than Guix is simply because they don’t actively sabotage my agency without offering any further societal gain.
The further societal gain is a popular distribution without nonfree blobs, driving more people to buy Guix-compatible hardware and so increase usage of libre-compatible hardware and software.
Except as a real world practical matter that is not actually happening at a level high enough to provide any real gain because Guix has little to no actual leverage in the market because Nix and Ubuntu exist. The market created by Guix is too small and is not likely to grow.
Not likely to grow? I remember that same rhetoric when I was buying an X200 to install Libreboot in my teens and now we have libre android phones and libre open-hardware laptops. Guix is another part of the general effort, and that effort has seen relatively massive and demonstrable gains over the past n years.
I disagree that Guix is part of that effort. I would more characterize those advancements as happening in spite of the GNU project. But at this point we have devolved into pure opinion and values so I don’t think the rest of the conversation will be productive.
OK man. If it wasn’t for FSF and GNU, and Stallman’s essays, I would never have given an F.
If your problem is that not many people use Guix because it forces you to use free software, then I direct you to the root comment’s discussion of practicality vs idealism. The FSF can’t help it if you decide not to use free software-compatible hardware, that’s your prerogative. They aren’t limiting your agency by failing to immediately reverse engineer and write free drivers for every new piece of hardware the day it comes out. This is ridiculously unreasonable.
Sure, you can get the same level of “agency” on Debian and Ubuntu but only if you install binary blobs or proprietary software. And if you don’t have any hardware that requires those, or don’t require any non-free software, then you have nothing to complain about with GNU, because GNU will work just fine for you!
You do understand how you can’t simultaneously say “GNU limits my agency by not letting me install binary blobs” and “so therefore I will instead use Debian or Ubuntu without binary blobs which is just as free as GNU!”, right? Either you believe using proprietary software is necessary to your “agency” or you don’t. You sound like you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too.
And I’m confused in general about the point of your argument from redundance against Guix’s existence. There are a million GNU/Linux distros. This is par for the course.
Sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy: if everyone believes that, nobody will make the effort required for the market to actually grow. A tragedy of the commons of sorts.
You don’t believe that society in general is more free because the linux kernel is GPL than it would have been if it had been MIT? I do.
And that’s even accepting the premise that the GNU project sabotages your agency. I don’t accept that premise because I don’t see how someone offering me a piece of software for free that I can modify at will can ever be said to reduce my agency, even if it does some things in ways I disagree with. I still have agency to use something else or change it to work the way I want it to. I don’t have agency to demand that the people I got it from do things the way I want them to, because that would be reducing their agency.
Oh certainly. But the linux kernel is not Guix and the bulk of that freedom has less to do with the GNU project itself than Linus. You could easily imagine him using a different license if the GPL hadn’t existed. I’ll give them credit for creating the license for him to use but nearly all of their distro work doesn’t fall into the same bucket.
But the GNU project did a lot more than create a license… it created a culture and the tools (like gcc and most of a complete Unix userspace) that made it possible for Linus to create Linux and release it under the GPL! Nowadays you can build a Linux-based OS with mostly or all non-GNU userspace, but that wasn’t true then and for many years afterward. Gcc and the associate tools provided a tremendous amount of “agency” to people who wanted to create free (or Open Source) software because Open Source doesn’t do anyone any good if you can’t build it. With the GNU tools available on pretty much any Unix-like platform and many others besides authors of Free Software could have the confidence that other people would be able to build the cord they distributed.
The better argument for slavery (devil’s advocate, obviously) is being able to sell yourself into slavery - or perhaps more realistically, offer yourself as collateral for a loan - because of course you’re going to pay back that loan, and it makes the investment safer from the lender’s side, thereby increasing the amount of money people are willing to lend. Blah blah blah, lubrication of innovation. In theory, it makes a lot of sense.
The argument against this is basically that society will squeeze whatever it can get from the poor, and once a new floor becomes an option it quickly becomes effectively mandatory, thus making it only nominally an actual freedom. Although, this transition of real choices into hobson’s choices is often rationalized by accusations of laziness or economic benefit (reducing worker wages will reduce the cost of goods, so the money you lose will come back to you, if it successfully travels through the entire rest of the economy without striking major market-distortions anywhere) rather than a plan for increasing real choices actually ever being planned.
Note that the lesser argument is still being used today with respect to permissive licences vs copyleft.
The idea is simple: permissive licences are more free because because you can do whatever you want with the software you got with it. Copyleft is less free because you can’t make a proprietary product out of the free software you just got.
Pointing out that the only freedom copyleft takes from you is the freedom to restrict the freedom of your users is not enough. Permissive weenies still cling to the idea that their negative freedom is more important, and that’s what “freedom” should mean. (Now I’m ignoring the very real problem of licence incompatibilities, but you get the idea.)
OK, now replace “bought” with “inherited” or “accepted a donation of”. One of the supposed strengths of free software is that you don’t have to buy new machines to get stuff done; you can just repurpose hardware that would otherwise be discarded.
Or “salvaged from a dumpster”. Which is how I got a couple of my early Linux boxes.
Thanks for emphasizing this angle.
I have no objection to things like keeping non-free drivers out of the “pure” distribution repositories. Though I feel strongly that it should only require minimal hoop-jumping to use those.
Removing the ability of the kernel to load microcode updates seems a bridge too far, though, IMO. I don’t think it’s serving freedom in any capacity to do that.
The whole point of the article is that GNU doesn’t support user agency. They are actively preventing you from doing what you want with your own hardware.
As for the freedom to have slaves vs not having slaves, that is a nonsense argument as it is simply a variant of the “tolerance paradox”.
I think your definition of the word active is somewhat misaligned with the dictionary definition. If they’re stopping you from using your hardware how you want to, it is by inaction. They haven’t been able to reverse engineer and write open source firmware and drivers for every piece of hardware on the planet. If this is the case for your hardware, it is not GNU’s fault that the maker of your hardware decided to limit your agency by locking down the firmware and making it proprietary; it’s the manufacturer’s fault for caring more about their profits than their users. If you’re using such hardware, it is not GNU’s fault that you don’t have agency; it’s literally your own fault for buying hardware that limits your agency.
But here’s the fun part – no one is forcing you to use such hardware, and even if you choose to, no one is forcing you to use GNU, so even if your argument made sense, GNU still isn’t limiting your agency in the slightest! Just use proprietary software. It’s just that it would be cool if you didn’t pretend that gave you more agency. I have proprietary BIOS; I have proprietary wireless drivers. My hardware is incompatible with coreboot et al, and my wireless card has no libre replacement drivers. But that’s not a good thing. I’m not going to pretend that’s a beautiful expression of user agency or whatever. My inability to inspect, modify, or use my own machine in any way other than that proscribed by a few billion dollar corporations is in fact not a good thing and does in fact limit my agency. It isn’t GNU’s fault that I can’t make my machine fully libre. It’s unfortunate, but I need a laptop, and I just can’t use an x220 or whatever for my job.
The FSF merely telling me that it would be better not to use proprietary blobs and drivers and firmware does not limit my freedom.
I disagree with this take. I believe that the software freedom movement needs a diverse spectrum of proponents with differing determination to enforce freedoms. We need absolutists like Richard Stallman and we need convenient but somewhat compromised distros like Ubuntu. Ultimately, if everyone thinks that Richard Stallman goes too far and uses Ubuntu instead, then GNU/Linux has almost entirely taken over, so it’s a win for the software freedom movement after all. The GNU philosophy shifts the overton window radically into the direction of software freedom, and even though their viewpoint may be extreme to some, this makes the Ubuntu user a moderate, which is a good thing. Remember: You are all on the same side, it’s just the extent of the goal that differs. After all, you would use fully open hardware and software over the proprietary stuff if it was just as affordable, reliable and available. Your problem is not the GNU philosophy, your problem is that the proprietary stuff is simply too desirable, so you compromise on your morals to get the technology you need. There’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t blame GNU for it.
I’d say the core problem is that the FSF (and by extension the GNU project) suck all the air out of the room while being solidly stuck in the past. They’ve completely ignored the reality of the modern age with companies like Amazon existing as they do. Sure it’s truly “free” to release something under the GPL then have Amazon take it, make some small changes, then host it. They’re allowed to under the GPL as they should be, but that seems like it goes against the principles of the FSF, GNU, and the GPL. The AGPL isn’t air tight, it’s sure as hell better than most other licenses and I personally use it, but we need better. We need a group focusing on the issues of the modern age.
We need a group who are focusing on the current issues with hardware and software freedom. Proprietary SaaS services and modern hardware. It’s all fine and good making sure your shell, editor, and kernel are truly free. But if they can’t run on hardware most users can actually get or need what’s the point? Most users can’t or aren’t willing to use an almost 15 year old Thinkpad as their one and only machine. Most users can’t run Replicant, they need access to Google Play Services and proprietary apps to actually live their life.
We need a group providing aid and resources to tackle these problems. Tools, training, equipment, and materials to help reverse engineer hardware and software. Very few people have the knowledge, ability, and free time to reverse engineer modern hardware, what if we had more? How many fewer binary blobs and proprietary drivers would we need if we actually focused on getting rid of the need for them rather than trying to pretend we don’t need them? Wouldn’t it be great if we had licenses for modern problems like cloud providers modifying, extending, and hosting services without providing the source.
Absolutism has it’s place, that’s for sure, but how do we actually get to that absolutist’s position? It requires work that the FSF and GNU just aren’t focusing on. And they hold their position while trying to be seen as the one true group who can deliver us to that position. Maybe another group needs to come along and actually do the work, but it’s hard with the FSF/GNU in the room.
Broadly agree, but a couple sticking points:
Would Amazon (and other _aaS providers) be the behemoths they are today if people had stuck with GNU/FSF principles? Would there be such a great demand for their services if new developers had been brought up in a culture where you were both expected to know and have access to the internal of your software and share your work?
That is rather the advantage of taking an uncompromising absolutist stance…by stubborn refusal to compromise it is much easier to make the claim that they are the one true group and that their approach optimizes for their ideology and minimizes change of corruption. The last…six?…years have shown that the slippery slope fallacy seldom is.
This analysis is a bit wishful in that it totally ignores economics (the root problem). Let’s say we had a group such as you describe, where are the incentives? where is the funding? why won’t this “pure” group immediately get outpaced by the group that forms around it to exploit the contradiction between the current economic system and the fiction you propose. The latter group would likely become relatively big quickly (size depending on the competence of the former group).
I think we need a new economic system. We measure the wrong things and as a result we compete to make the wrong numbers go up. Who cares about the exact score of a passing grade? or how many jurors were unsure in a “not guilty” verdict? consider the phrase “fuck you money”, what does it mean? … From what I can tell; we would not have a (a priori) global (reserve) currency in a truly decentralized system, there cannot be a central coordinator, so we cannot have a (postulated) global currency. At best it’ll be emergent from the reputation system we end up with.
What I worry about is that the software that gets built is the software that gets used. All the FOSS world lending a helping hand with better contact tracing software (instead of communication software, which is just as needed in a pandemic that may go on for an indeterminate amound of time) is a symptom of this problem. We need to be smarter about our priorities or we will end up running our governments and “citizen points” (a.k.a. “how to wealth distribute” from pov of gov) on some chinese system “because it exists” … please let’s not have that happen.
2000s problem: my word processor is proprietary, costs a lot, and uses proprietary file formats that I’m required to use for everything, so I’m stuck paying egregious prices to an evil monopoly.
2020s problem: my word processor is a free web app that supports open standards and runs on any web browser and any operating system, so that’s great, but I’m still locked in to a proprietary ecosystem because only a few mega-corporations can afford the massive expense of creating and running such a thing.
It’s a different set of problems and will require different solutions.
Agreed. Obviously there’s a lot of nuance, but I think this is a big part of the problem. I also tend to think that the solutions are no longer as technical as they once were. In the 80s and 90s it was pretty clear that what was needed was to write a bunch of software to replace the proprietary software that existed. But today, that’s a whole lot less effective because running the software is now nearly as complicated as writing the software because we want everything to be always-online, but GNU doesn’t seem to have a viable plan for that.
This is why sandstorm exists. We could use more hands (or funds).
At some point I want to write an article on this exact problem. The title would be “it’s the economy, stupid” and I seriously wonder whether I would actually need to write the body.
Only have friends who play Battle for Wesnoth, ez
And Super Tux Kart (which, ngl, is a super-fun game to play with family).
Once you remove the need for friends, then you remove the need to play proprietary games with them and you can focus on your freedom with CLI Nethack.
You misspelled Tremulous.
This paragraph is really funny to me because it reveals a stunning lack of understanding of the problems free software is intended to solve and just generally of the topic at hand in their own article. It turns out the FSF’s definition of freedom is somewhat different than “being able to play the greatest number of games possible”.
Okay, then buy a different wi-fi card. Stop trying to use something designed to be incompatible with your proprietary hardware and then getting mad about it not being supported.
Are you offering to pay for it? Aren’t we all supposed to be out there installing Linux for our friends and relatives to save them from… well, something? Most of those people already have computers that require compromises.
Then install a distro that does that? GNU Guix is one of literally dozens of active and we’ll maintained distros for people to choose from. Guix System is for people who choose to be uncompromising in their free software stance (with exceptions of course). Would they like for more people to be uncompromising? Yes. Until that day comes is anyone forced to use guix as a Linux distro? No, not at all.
Their argument is that self-advertised “libre” distributions not only reduce both user agency and total value to the user (including materially important things like security), but also they’re advertised as increasing user agency, when they don’t. Neither of those problems are solved if you, personally, don’t use Guix, because it’ll still sucker in some people who believe the marketing. The problem isn’t just that Guix doesn’t do the thing, it’s that it’s marketed as doing the thing.
So, amend the marketing, or change Guix to actually respect user freedom - just don’t keep lying.
Or just use #nonguix
Well, that’s what I do.
The whole point of this article is to show that while guix claims to be absolutely dedicated to increasing user agency they deliberately remove the ability for a user to use their computer as they want.
Obviously people can use other distros but that isn’t the point. The point is that guix is explicitly doing the opposite of what they claim to be doing.
#nonguix is the guix equivalent of Debian’s non-free repo, not a different distro
I agree, that’s a reasonable stance. That’s actually why I use a Mac, because I got sick of using software that wasn’t designed to work with my hardware :-)
One of the advantages MacOS has is it’s not a mongrel of an OS and most apps follow it’s HIG. So I definitely can relate there.
Alas electron apps are increasingly ruining that. So many now necessary apps that can’t do basic things like find correctly.
This is a really user-hostile response. What if I’m a lifelong Windows user who now wants to try Linux? What if I’m low-income and don’t want to spend the money on purchasing a libre wifi card, or the time to do research on it? What if I’m a gamer who wants my software to be more free than it is, but isn’t a free-software zealot? What if I want wifi 6 and don’t want to spend hours looking for a card with free drivers, or days writing my own?
You misunderstand their arguments. They’re not complaining about the existence of a distro that doesn’t allow them to install proprietary software; they’re complaining that it’s marketed as increasing user freedom, when it clearly does not, and that the community actively invests effort in making it harder to learn about things that would provide value to the user.
I don’t think it is hostile, no. It’s not hostile to tell someone “the thing you have isn’t compatible with what we’re doing”, it’s a statement of fact. If you’re low-income, that’s unfortunate and you’ll have to stick to using not-guix until your hardware is compatible. If you’re not a “free software zealot”, go ahead and use something else or install the nonfree guix repos. If you want wifi 6, you’ll have to use something compatible with wifi 6. It’s not their goal to be compatible with every possible use case.
Guix is not marketed as increasing user freedom. That’s silly. It’s marketed as respecting your freedoms.
It’s not the Guix project’s job to tell you about all the wonderful software that goes against their core values. That’s antithetical to the mission of replacing proprietary software with libre software.
Has this actually happened? Getting banned for talking about nonguix?
Not sure about getting banned, per se, but it’s explicitly discouraged. The second paragraph of nonguix’s readme:
Holy shit, that’s extremely disrespectful to users.
I would recommend actually reading the help-guix archives to see how often support issues are created and how many issues users have are ignored or told they are out of place.
I admit I fucked up and misunderstood the rules. My complaint now reads:
That’s made up, like most of that article, it’s full of misconceptions. Can’t tell whether or not this has been written in good faith.
But hey, outrage is good to attract attention. Proof to the point: I’m commenting this out of outrage.
Hehe, yeah, the FSF and SFC use outrage constantly! I get emails all the time telling me that Microsoft and Apple are teaming up to murder babies or whatever. It’s pretty much all they have left at this point, and I say this as someone who donated and generally supported their mission for many, many years (which is why I still get the emails).
Hyperbole and untruths are like pissing in your shoes to get warm; backfire once the initial heat is gone.
When I wrote that bit I made the assumption that violating the rules of the channel could get you banned. I admit that it looks wrong in hindsight, so I am pushing a commit to amend it.
Not to my knowledge. No. I’ve seen it tut-tutted but I’ve yet to see someone get banned.
That’s 100% messed up if true.
I must say that I like Artemis’ reply. The GNU-Free distributions do fill a purpose, a niche that explores how much can actually be done with only freely available code.
But they aren’t advertised as “see how much can be done” niche experiments, they’re advertised as “The Only Option For Freedom™ And If You Use Something Else You’re A Sellout”.
I remember I was once at a talk by that now unpopular person and they were asked what OS they run, and replied “I don’t want to tell you because it’s not a good one. You should use Trisquel”…
If they are not sold that way, they’d not be championed as realistic options for humans. They’d fill fascinating roles, along such operating systems as Haiku and Plan 9.
Really?
I don’t have time for the actual outcomes that GNU has played a hand in, but while this is a pretty good rant, it’s something of a category mistake to complain about the GNU project not playing well with closed source hardware. That’s … the point?
Agency is not the same thing as control. Free Software is not just about positive empowerment, but also removing proprietary control.
Rephrasing: if their goal is user liberation, then they should make it easy for users to add proprietary controls to their environment. But this is a clear contradiction, since proprietary control is a limitation on user agency.
It doesn’t require proprietary firmware. It requires a driver. The driver could be authored by anybody with time, patience, a piece of hardware, and the programming manual. Being angry at the Free Software community for not producing the programming manual is misdirection; it wasn’t their obligation.
And distros based on ports trees, from Gentoo to NixOS, are even more empowering, since they lower the discussed adoption barriers even further.
That’s a euphemistic way to say “there’s also an intentional reduction in user freedom/agency/control along a specific axis”.
There is no contradiction. “Making it easy for a user to add proprietary controls to their environment” increases user liberation, period - the claim that this translates to a limitation on user agency is a fallacy. There may be a self-imposed limitation on user agency if the user then decides to exercise this right to add a proprietary control, but that’s a choice the user has - therefore, a freedom, or an agency, if you will, and certainly not one the user is forced into.
How is this relevant to the article? Is the argument materially changed by s/firmware/driver/?
This is a misdirection itself - the anger is directed at the community for intentionally making it difficult or impossible to install proprietary software or coordinate doing so - if you read just a few sentences up, you’ll see “talk about that in the main #guix channel and you get told to not talk about it”. This actively requires more work on the side of the #guix channel users than not saying anything at all.
Nobody is asking for open-source programmers to do anything for free here - the issues are (1) FSF’s misleading use of terms like “freedom” when they actively restrict user freedom by making it difficult to install various kinds of proprietary software and (2) some parts of the community that buy into the FSF’s ideology doing similar things.
This isn’t the dunk you think it is. From the perspective of a free software purist the user is less liberated from the grasp of proprietary software when they are encouraged to and supported in their use of proprietary software.
I wasn’t trying to be coy or euphemistic. Suppose we have two different ports trees of Free Software. Despite neither tree’s contents adding controls to its users, the different capabilities available to users of the two different trees reflect a difference in agency: the users are free to install different packages.
Hardware does not require proprietary firmware, in general. Certainly, the typical WiFi chipset does not. Rather, proprietary firmware is one possible way of configuring the hardware. My favorite vendor to use as an illustration is nVidia, whose GPUs can either be driven with proprietary firmware over an nVidia-only interface, or with reverse-engineered firmware over common interfaces.
Seems like everytime Xe tries guix they comes back with a worse take.
The first time I can remember is when they couldn’t use tramp on guix. The problem there was Doom Emacs handled a quirk about tramping into NixOS but at the time didn’t handle that same quirk that is also true of Guix. Because they wasn’t aware that doom did this for them, they just assumed Guix was broken and ranted about it then.
This time they’re ranting about GNU and I can’t help but assume it’s in anger at another attempt at using Guix that went badly. They include a conversation about having to do extra steps to use the nonguix channel and says that she will get “banned” for talking about nonfree software. But that just isn’t true. I’m on the guix mailing list and the irc and the most I’ve ever seen happen to someone is they get told to please not discuss or promote nonfree software and the conversation moves on. I’m pretty sure they only “ban” for spamming or being a jerk and that’s only after a generously numerous amount warnings.
Maybe they should stop trying to use Guix as a distribution and focus on using it as a package manager/devops tool. Then in the world of virtual machines or whatever they can chill the fuck out. That is if they fixed their tramp woes.
EDIT: Fixed pronouns (I think)
please let’s not use “GNU-Free” to describe distros that use tons of GNU software.
I believe that is being used as a way to disambiguate definitions of “free”, as shorthand for “the GNU definition of free”.
To me it reads like “this does not contain GNU”, as in “sugar-free”.
GNU!Free
GNU/free, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus free,
yes
I’m uncomfortable with the way the discussion here (and in some respect the original post, but mostly the discussion) seems to constantly jump between talking about decisions of the Guix project specifically, the whole GNU project, or even the FSF and the SFC. All of these entities have done things in the past that one may disagree with, but the discussion feels like somehow the Guix developers/maintainers/contributors where exactly the same people who made decisions you dislike about that other GNU project (GCC? Emacs? who knows), or the FSF, Stallman, etc. They’re quite probably not!
When I read stuff like
I feel bad for the Guix contributors reading this, that somehow are held responsible for things wildly outside their control.
The original post is mostly talking about decisions from the Guix community itself (the default kernel, the policies about how to discuss non-free software for Guix, etc.), not other GNU projects or related organizations. I would encourage people to stick to this approach.
I agree with what you say except for this last bit about the original post. This post, when read carefully, was completely about Guix. At the same time the title and lead up to revealing what inspired this rant (Guix uses a libre kernel, and discourages discussion of proprietary software) did exactly what you said these comments are doing, conflating the guix project with other GNU and FSF stuff that ultimately are out of the project’s control.
I would love if people could talk about guix but not use that as a jumping off point to rant about the GNU or whoever they’re mad at.
I’m kind of confused regarding the CPU microcode updates. A microcode update is just that, an update for nonfree code that is already running on the machine, usually to make said system more secure. If they were really this serious about not allowing proprietary code of any kind to run on a machine, their default kernel should halt as soon as it detects a nonfree CPU with some sort of message. But I guess they don’t do that because it wouldn’t allow anyone to boot up the system…
As someone who used to run Parabola and run linux-libre I find myself agreeing with this rant pretty hard. Trying to use a hard line freedom distro rapidly became a major obstacle to getting anything I actually needed done.
I like free software but I really wish there were more people taking a practical approach (and doing so publicly) to fight against the prevailing FSF “too holy to talk about proprietary software” stance.
Better support for things like license filtering with easy to add exceptions and sandboxing to let people make their own choices on the degree of freedom they want rather than just trisquel vs debian vs ubuntu.
The counter-argument by Artemis goes like this: the availability of GNU-Free distros increases user agency because it gives Libre Enthusiast Strawpersons the ability to choose a GNU-Free distro that fits their needs better.
There are two problems here: one, the argument about whether the existence of GNU-Free distros increases user agency globally is different than the one in Xe’s post about how said distros decrease agency locally, for a user using the system - they’re separate levels of argument, and can both be true at the same time. (that is, I don’t think that the “response” post actually responds to the arguments in the original)
Two, the claim “In this case, a distribution that allows proprietary software actually decreases their agency.” is made, but there’s no supporting evidence - where is the decrease in agency?
There’s “I know that no matter what I do on my system, I’m not going to accidentally turn on the non-free repos.” but that’s not an increase in agency - it’s no-change at best, and still a decrease at worst. Those are safety rails - and safety is perpetually in tension with agency and freedom.
There’s “my distribution maintainers are designing with this in mind, so they’ll be more likely to actively look for free alternatives to proprietary software that other distributions might handwave on account of already providing a non-free option” but the existence or absence of software is an ecosystem problem, not a freedom problem (at least not in the sense of “what technical limitations does the system impose on me” (like preventing kernel blobs) that is the topic of discussion).
That is - the counter-post doesn’t name any kind of freedom or agency that is reduced by using a non-GNU-free distro, and half of their argument rests on that.
Reply to https://lobste.rs/s/chvnue/gnu_doesn_t_care_about_your_agency, can be folded there
I feel like there must be some reasonable middle ground. IIRC, Debian has a very clear separation between free software and non-free software, doesn’t install non-free stuff by default, but if you decide you want non-free, you can toggle it on and gain the additional functionality. Having ethical defaults and making it clear when you’re compromising principles/hackability for some short-term usability benefit seems like a good way to maximize user empowerment.
Why exactly can’t GNU
projectsGuix act like Debian? (Or my understanding of Debian, if I’ve gotten that wrong.) Can someone explain like I’m five?One of my top reasons for being passionate about FOSS is I am very worried about the climate crisis / ecological destruction, and I consider the right to repair + keeping old hardware functional to be vital to reducing energy use + e-waste. Refusing to interoperate with hardware produced by unscrupulous companies seems to me to interfere with my ethical commitments to fight climate change, insofar as it interferes with salvage computing and making more efficient use of the devices we have.
Well. There’s an unofficial guix channel called nonguix that packages some nonfree and binary software, particularly the mainline Linux kernel with all of its nonfree firmwareand Firefox nightly. They even recently started running a substitution server. The Guix manual and other resources gives you everything you need to know to add this channel. But there process of finding and addinf it are up to you. It isn’t discussed in any of the official guix channels or on the website. That’s probably as good as it’s going to get and it’s a solution that satisfies many guix users (myself included).
There is a solution in place, but the author isnt a fan.
What I’m trying to get a better understanding of is why hiding the solution is ethically necessary. What is the moral gain from having a hidden solution passed around under the table? It reminds me of security through obscurity… ethics through obscurity? nonguix is ethical so long as it’s hard to find? I find it unconvincing as an ethical strategy, but perhaps I’m misunderstanding or missing something.
Another way to approach this is, what would it take to convince the project to just be public and transparent about the existence of this compromise? What are there exact objections, and are there any possible ways to satisfy them without obscurity?
The “compromise” is unofficial. The Guix project proper doesn’t have anything to be up front about because non guix isn’t a GNU project. As far as moral gains go I believe you’re thinking too hard about it. GNU guix was made as a GNU project, it has been upfront about its stance on non free hardware. A user has the tools to add non free or proprietary software to their system but Guix doesn’t promote that use case.
Non guix as a project has goals to package things that will never be made available in the official guix channel. There’s some contributer overlap but ultimately it is it’s own entity.
I’ll say more about compromises and ethics.
I can be very uncompromising at times. For example, I hate cars, and when I had to move house, I decided to move house entirely by electric bicycle + cargo trailer. Exactly one car load traveled from my old apartment to my new house (in an electric car), everything else was hauled by bike. I learned a lot about moving heavy and bulky objects by bike, about the various biking routes through my city, and had some good times with friends who joined in to help with the bike caravan. Most of all, I proved that moving 11 miles uphill by bike was doable, given the right tools, and therefore shorter, flatter bicycle moves should be considered feasible.
Shortly after finishing the bike move, my family sold a house a few states away and wanted to give me some furniture from it. Aside from being exhausted, it was not practical to move the furniture that distance by bike (although I did travel to pack up that house using only trains + bicycles). My only choices were to risk the furniture being thrown out (a horrifying waste), or to accept a moving truck. This felt ironic after all of the effort I had just gone through to avoid using a moving van.
Did accepting a moving truck in the less ideal instance invalidate all of the work I’d put into avoiding cars in my bicycle move? Did it erase what I learned from the experience? Am I a bad person because I compromised that time, when I was able to be uncompromising before? No. The world is a better place in some small way because of my efforts, and if bike moves like mine can be replicated, improved, and scaled up, we might have a better chance of averting climate disaster. The measurable harm of the emissions from that moving truck are undeniable, and if our civilization wants to have a future, we’ll have to (re)learn how to move more stuff over longer distances with much less emissions / resource use. (Why couldn’t I book a container on a train to move house instead of a truck, for instance? Or on a sail cargo ship?) But it’s not right to pin our collective societal failure on me.
Compromising is just recognizing my limitations as an individual, or even as a small group of individuals. Solving collective problems requires collective action, and while experimenting with purism can be valuable in order to imagine a better future and learn how to build it, we need to be kind to ourselves in dealing with problems that all of humanity had a hand in creating. The issues are bigger than we are, and it is hubris to think we can solve them alone. Trying to do so is a recipe for burnout and personal suffering for only marginal gain, your efforts will be more sustainable and replicable if you can operate less painfully.