Re: Software Freedom in education (was Re: very specific project proposal Re: What does Elon Musk say about free software?)
The biggest impediment to getting free software used on campuses (and in the business world) is the lack of beginner-level support for switching from Windows or Mac to a free OS. The problem with multiple Linux (and similar) setups, each adapted for different specific needs, is that the average Windows user has no idea how to pick one, and installation is often followed by problems like "this laptop can no longer connect to the internet until you download a set of drivers for it which you'll need to do on another machine, and then transfer in." Tech support for newbie problems is often downright hostile. "If you don't know how to use a command line, just go back to Windows." Alternately, the solutions offered are couched in technical language that require several followup questions like "how would I find out if I have that permission?" and "I don't know what those settings are, where do I find them?" And if they ask on Stack Exchange or Stack Overflow, newbie questions are often faced with reactions like "question closed" followed by a link to another question that they do not understand as similar to theirs. The reactions to complaints about this are usually "We're not hostile; we just don't want to waste time. Learn to ask better questions." That might be fine for beginning coders. It is not fine for high school students who are just trying to have a functional computer that does web browsing, document editing, and maybe a bit of gaming. The end result is not going to be "this person studies the software and comes back with better questions"; it's going to be "I guess I'll switch back to Windows." As long as switching to a free OS comes with a 3+ week self-directed training period of "google for answers to 'why isn't this basic thing working like I expect it to?'" very few people are going to switch - or at least, very few of them will switch and stay. (Insisting "hey you should use duckduckgo or startpage instead of google" will not result in more people converting to free software.) And that applies to other free software as well. The benefits of switching from MS Office to LibreOffice have to be couched as something other than "you won't be supporting an evil megacorp and you won't be handing them all your user data." Because for most people, those are non-issues, and certainly not worth the hassle of relearning office software and dealing with the lack of features they've come to expect. (If anyone knows a free-software equivalent of Acrobat Pro or InDesign, I'd love to hear about it. And every few years, I install LibreOffice and see if it'll cover how I use Word; it does not.) (It would cover how I use Excel and PPT, but I don't see the value in using those without switching the whole suite. Especially since my job insists on the MS Suite.) If you want schools & businesses to use free software, set up a website that recommends one OS and has a quick-install bundle of common student/business software. (PortableApps.com has a terrific setup for this, but afiak it's Windows-only.) Set up a forum or (sigh) Discord for questions, and be supportive to clueless people who are trying out what they think is a new fad. Find volunteers who are happy to answer endless beginner questions about how the command line works and explain basic vocabulary, over and over. (There can be a FAQ page. Very few beginners will read it, and some of the answers are likely to be too technical or too long or both. And if the point is converting people to free software, "go away and come back when you understand better" is not going to work.) Offer bundle deals with tech support for small businesses that want to convert their whole office to free software. Or to schools that want to equip all their students with Linux laptops. Offer to teach online classes to high school students, to explain how computers work--because we've reached a point where millions of people have no idea how "saving a file" works. [1]https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-str ucture-education-gen-z The free software movement is not friendly or welcoming to non-coders. As long as that's true, it's not going to get strong inroads into education or the business world. Complaining about how we got here won't fix any of the problems, and only adds to the belief that the free software movement is for elitist techies, not for everyday users. On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 10:06 AM Lars Noodén <[2]lars.noo...@gmx.com> wrote: I fully support building curricula on Free Software exclusively, or as close to that as possible with an eye towards achieving 100% in the near future. RMS wrote an essay around 20 years ago, "Why Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software" [1], which could still serve as a
Re: Should distros take steps to reduce russian access to Free Software?
This makes no sense. "Free software" does not mean "until you use it for immoral or illegal purposes." First, the practical side: Savannah, Github, and Sourceforge are not the only sources. There are distributors, small and large, all over the web. If the big three stopped hosting it, or blocked downloads, other ones would pop up quickly. This happens even for pirate sites - did the end of Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa end unauthorized music downloading? Once the code is out there, there's no putting it back under lock. If the free software community wanted to prevent the software from being used for evil, that needed to be folded into the original license, not added decades later. This is hardly the first war, nor the first horrifically oppressive political action, since the free software movement began. More importantly: Any restrictions on distribution or use will hit marginalized communities first and hardest. This is always what happens when "morality" laws are introduced - the goal is to restrict or end corruption, but the result is crackdowns on the people who are easiest to find and punish. The penalties hit the people who don't have resources, not the ones who are causing the problems. You think the Russian government and military orgs can't operate VPNs? It's the everyday citizens, ones who oppose the war, who would be hurt by "no downloading from Russian IPs." Hell, if they need to, Russian gov't agents can travel to other countries, buy a new laptop, and download anything they want. There is no type of restriction on access that is going to hurt the Russian government and military more than it hurts the average user, who had no choice in the war. On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 8:23 AM Félicien Pillot <[1]felic...@gnu.org> wrote: Le Tue, 8 Mar 2022 23:50:45 +0100, Valentino Giudice <[2]valentino.giudic...@gmail.com> a écrit : > > This is not cooperating with community and society, it's mass > > murder by complacency and sooner we take action on this the sooner > > the russian gov will have issues getting updates for GNU and FSF to > > contribute to the non-fascist side of this war. > > Freedom 2 is necessary to help others with the purpose of making > society better, but it absolutely is not and has never been limited to > that: you can choose whom to help (by giving copies of the software to > those people) regardless of their intentions. When you say "you" a.k.a. the distributor of the software, it means: those who host online the source code and binary packages, from the forges and cvs repositories to the GNU/Linux system distributions. So what we could ask, is that Savannah, Github or Sourceforge, and Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu, stop to distribute free software in Russia. WDYT? -- Félicien Pillot 2C7C ACC0 FBDB ADBA E7BC 50D9 043C D143 6C87 9372 [3]felic...@gnu.org - [4]felicien.pil...@riseup.net ___ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [5]libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org [6]https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discus s References 1. mailto:felic...@gnu.org 2. mailto:valentino.giudic...@gmail.com 3. mailto:felic...@gnu.org 4. mailto:felicien.pil...@riseup.net 5. mailto:libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org 6. https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss ___ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
Re: A mathematical, non-corruptable, algorithmic, democratic and free system of government and society
On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 11:06 AM Jean Louis wrote: > > The way I look at the issue, though, is that the problem is with Statist > > society in general. Hierarchical societies are not natural for humans, [citation needed] We have always had hierarchies. We have not always had absolute hierarchies, where the person/people in charge of one area are presumed to be in charge of all others. But human societies have never been "every person decides what to do for themselves, without repercussions if they disagree with the leaders." ...This is pretty much built into our genes, as three-year-olds who decide to do what they want without paying attention to their leaders, generally don't grow up to pass on those genes. Obedience to authority is a survival trait. It's one that needs temperance as people grow - teens challenge authority so that, as adults, they can learn to be authorities. (Even if only over themselves. 8-year-olds don't get to make all their own decisions; adults do. What age or milestone makes someone "adult" varies widely by culture.) But any claim that "people should be free to decide their own actions" needs to consider how that applies to small children. Do they decide? Do their parents decide? What about abusive or neglectful parents? (Who steps in to stop them?) > 1. What if, in an anarchy, people get murdered? Is that okay? It is not okay. How is that decision enforced in an anarchy? Who decides what behaviors are not okay, and who's responsible for making other people go along with them? This has always been the problem with proposed anarchies. Most anarchists agree that various acts of violence are wrong and not allowed - murder, torture, theft, and so on - but their proposed non-government doesn't have any method for dealing with people who do these things. It's like the assumption is, "if we get rid of governments, nobody will want to murder their neighbor for playing their music too late at night. Nobody will murder their ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend." Freedom is easy, do whatever you wish but don't force other people to do it. If we all follow that simple principle, we would not have any troubles. Create agreements and do it with people in agreement. The idea of "free to act as long as others agree" handwaves past the existence of scam artists and charismatic predators. In an anarchist society, is one free to convince others to take heroin? Is there an age of consent? If so, who decides what it is, and who decides what happens to people who violate it? It also skips over the problem of accidents. If I light my home with candles and, with the wax buildup on the walls, a spark makes my house catch on fire, and it burns down three other houses and kills several people - am I a murderer? If I burn charcoal for heat in winter and most of my family dies from carbon monoxide poisoning - am I a murderer? (Will there be a public education system to warn people not to burn charcoal indoors? Who administers it? Who pays for it?) > 2. Are people in the anarchy free to setup a dictatorship, with guns > and cannons? Is this power limited? If it is, how is this an > anarchy? I find anarchy represents freedom. Anarchy means that above, do what you wish, but don't force others. As soon as you start forcing others to do anything, that is government. We don't need governments, we need consciousness. [citation needed] You seem to be saying that if everyone were reasonably well-educated, there would be no predators, no people working in bad faith, no short-sighted people who insist that it's fine if they dump toxic waste in the river near their house because it'll just wash out to sea and not be a problem. Modern corporate shenanigans says this is not true. Education and resources do not bring empathy. I'm not sure what "consciousness" means here, but a few million years of human history show that it's never going to be a universal trait. I understand the appeal of "if people would just pay attention and try to get along, we could sort out all these problems! We have the resources to make the world a much better place!" Where I disagree, is the apparent assumption that there is some magic-button method that will switch the majority of people from however they are today, to whatever kind of people they'd need to be for this method to work. > not only because direct democracy doesn't scale (this could be > overcome with blockchains and decentralized networking), it's also Blockchain and decentralized networking cannot fix the problems with democracy, because "decentralized" anything cannot fix the problems of identity scams. We have plenty of decentralized systems right now. The entire
Re: A mathematical, non-corruptable, algorithmic, democratic and free system of government and society
On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 9:44 AM Andrew Yu via libreplanet-discuss <[1]libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org> wrote: Hi, friends at Libreplanet. During a discussion in #fsf, we were quite critical of modern society, especially on copyright, patents, "intellectual property", healthcare and Capitalism. A (possibly sarcastic of modern society) suggestion was raised to build islands in the middle of oceans from plastic waste and run a free society there. This has been tried. Multiple times. It flops horribly because (1) the people throwing money at it would like to believe that they won't be bound by international treaties & local laws and (2) it's invariably started by a group that wants to be a master class, and imagine they will bring in servant-types at some later date, and that those servant-types will be content to live and work under conditions that don't give them the protections they have from existing laws. Examples: 2014 [2]https://www.vice.com/en/article/bn53b3/atlas-mugged-922-v21n10 2016 [3]https://www.gq.com/story/the-libertarian-utopia-thats-just-a-bunch-o f-white-guys-on-a-tiny-island 2017 [4]https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/30/colorado-springs- libertarian-experiment-america-215313/ 2020 [5]https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-b ear-book-review-free-town-project 2021 [6]https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voyage-satos hi-cryptocurrency-cruise-ship-seassteading And the shiny new attempt for 2022: [7]https://cryptoland.is/ A "free" ocean nation is possible... if you don't need wifi or other technology that comes from land; if you don't need to buy food or get medical services from land; if you don't need to dock a ship anywhere; if you don't intend to export goods or services to any country. If you do plan to maintain connections with the mainland, there's a host of laws and international treaties that will apply. And most of the "live free" movements want that to be "live free and rich," not "find somewhere that we can do subsistence farming where no gov't will care enough to notice us." You can live free by moving to any number of remote, inhospitable locales. In groups, even. But you can't live tax-free and still participate in commerce with people who pay taxes. (Well, it's possible, but the setup for that isn't "invent a country in a spot nobody's claimed"; it's "invent a business that shuffles money in so many directions that governments get dizzy trying to find the cup with the ball under it.") I thought: Why aren't we doing a great job convincing users to switch to free software as a replacement to the proprietary software they use? Some classmates that I tried convincing into using Trisquel GNU/Linux noted that most modern programs that they use day-to-day only run on Android, Apple iOS, Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows, The reason people don't switch to Linux is that support for new users SUCKS. You'd think that, after 20+ years of Unix-based software, there'd be a plethora of "How to Dump Windows And Switch To [version] Linux!" websites. There are not. Instead, plenty of Windows users who try to switch discover "I have installed this new OS and my wifi doesn't work." Or their audio doesn't work. Or they try to install WINE so they can use the apps they need for work, and it doesn't work. Or they try to play games and discover that Steam-for-Linux and Steam-via-WINE have two different feature sets, and one of them doesn't work for their favorite game. And so on. (I have two adult daughters who have switched from Windows to Linux. They both hate Windows. Neither has strong software requirements. Both occasionally have to wipe their system and reinstall the OS because they can't figure out how to fix the odd problems that show up. ...Neither of them has work-related content or settings that would be destroyed by a reinstall.) I am on Windows because I'm a power user of several apps with no Linux versions: Acrobat Pro, InDesign, MS Word, FineReader (you've probably never heard of it, and that's very reasonable). I'm a regular user of other programs with no Linux versions. And seeing the nightmares my kids have had with using WINE does not make me happy at the idea of switching. (I'm aware that there's LibreOffice and other free software that cover most of what Word does. They don't cover everything that Word does, and they won't cover the 25% extra time it'll take me to find everything for a few months while I get used to them. A big part of my job is "Hey here is a document; it's got [list of problems]; fix those and get it back to me within an hour before the client meeting." I can't do that on unfamiliar software.) I do a lot in PowerPoint, not
Re: Are there any eBook readers one can use in freedom?
Mobileread was developing "Open Inkpot" for a while, an open-source firmware thing for ereaders. It was discontinued several years ago, because it was getting harder to find devices it worked with and lack of interest from the original devs. I have no idea if anyone could make it work on modern readers - it stalled out in 2013 - but the code is (sort of) available if anyone wants to try. [1]https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=169 Git is gone but waybacked (mostly?) [2]https://web.archive.org/web/20120113003826/http://git.open inkpot.org/ I had a Kobo Mini for a while. It was okay, although I got frustrated that, when the battery was low, the touchscreen often had problems - didn't recognize touches for page turns, or doubleclicked, and so on. After the initial login & setup, I turned off wifi & turned off software updates and it worked fine. I sideloaded books instead of using any online features. Good with epub, okay with mobi, the normal set of problems with PDFs. I don't know if its mediocre mobi coverage was because it wasn't as good at them, or because mobi is a more limited format and the ones I had, weren't very well-made. (Like, chapters often failed to start on new pages.) It was terrible for .doc, .rtf, and .html formats - did weird things with line breaks, would sometimes break in the middle of a word, would resize fonts (usually to "way too small"), and other problems like that. Also I think it only had 3 font sizes to choose from, but (1) that could easily have changed and (2) I might be mis-remembering. On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 12:13 PM Jan Prunk <[3]janpr...@gmail.com> wrote: Hello, Maybe Parabola-rM with reMarkable reader? [1][4]http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/ Regards, Jan On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 4:13 AM J.B. Nicholson <[2][5]j...@forestfield.org> wrote: I would like to try reading some DRM-free eBooks with a backlit eBook reader which is lighter than using a laptop and less expensively than using a laptop. I don't need it to be network accessible (no wifi, no Bluetooth needed) so long as it has a USB port and a high capacity storage medium (perhaps a compact flash card) that I can easily copy eBooks to, install in the eBook reader, and use the eBook reader to read files. File format support should include common eBook formats that one can use in freedom (I'd imagine PDFs and epub are reasonable choices). The device should offer the ability to be recharged, ideally with batteries I can replace. It's also okay if the device needs to be plugged in while using the device. It's fine if the device has no upgradable software on it so long as what's on the device works reliably. Editing and/or marking up what I'm reading is not required. Does anyone know of a recommendable device that would do these things? I looked in [3][6]https://ryf.fsf.org/ and [4][7]https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en and I didn't notice anything named "ebook reader" or similar language. If I've overlooked something I should consider, please do let me know the URL for that device. Thanks. ___ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [5][8]libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org [6][9]https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-dis cus s -- Jan Prunk [7][10]janpr...@gmail.com Tel: +386 41 710598 Website: [8][11]https://janprunk.com PGP key: [9][12]https://janprunk.com/pubkey.asc PGP fp: 632E 9670 A3F3 46D3 9090 D59A C6FE 96E1 9FD7 F151 References 1. [13]http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/ 2. mailto:[14]j...@forestfield.org 3. [15]https://ryf.fsf.org/ 4. [16]https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en 5. mailto:[17]libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org 6. [18]https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discu ss 7. mailto:[19]janpr...@gmail.com 8. [20]https://janprunk.com/ 9. [21]https://janprunk.com/pubkey.asc ___ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [22]libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org [23]https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discu ss References 1. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=169 2.
Re: Are there any eBook readers one can use in freedom?
I have a Pocketbook Touch HD3, and I'm happy with it. It does epub very well and mobi tolerably (I only use mobi when a free ebook isn't offered in epub and I'm too lazy to convert with Calibre). It can read PDFs but has the same problem as any small screen - PDFs are meant be a page-based format, and anything involving reflowing the text is likely to have problems. (How well it works depends a lot on what software was used to make the PDF.) It's got wifi, which I've never turned on; a touch screen, which I use about half the time (I like page-turn buttons); and a frontlight. (E-ink doesn't have backlight, but they do a reasonably good imitation these days.) Doesn't have a flash card but 16gb is a ridiculous amount of storage for ebooks. Does not have user-replaceable batteries; it plugs into a USB port to charge or sideload books. NewEgg is one of the few places in the US that sells them: [1]https://www.newegg.com/PocketBook-International-SA-E-Book-Read ers/BrandSubCat/ID-207683-782 They weren't available in the US at all for many years. The Pocketbook HD is my fifth or sixth ereader; my all-time favorite stopped being produced years ago, but this one ranks 2nd or 3rd for me. If it's too pricey, or not quite what you're looking for, Mobileread's "Which One Should I Buy?" forum is a terrific place to get the pros and cons of several devices: [2]https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=123 If you don't mind dealing with Amazon, the Kindles are probably the cheapest on the market. They make it complicated to sideload ebooks purchased or free-downloaded from other places, but it can be done. You'd also need to get used to Calibre to convert other ebook formats into mobi or azw3 for a Kindle. On Tue, Dec 21, 2021 at 7:13 PM J.B. Nicholson <[3]j...@forestfield.org> wrote: I would like to try reading some DRM-free eBooks with a backlit eBook reader which is lighter than using a laptop and less expensively than using a laptop. I don't need it to be network accessible (no wifi, no Bluetooth needed) so long as it has a USB port and a high capacity storage medium (perhaps a compact flash card) that I can easily copy eBooks to, install in the eBook reader, and use the eBook reader to read files. File format support should include common eBook formats that one can use in freedom (I'd imagine PDFs and epub are reasonable choices). The device should offer the ability to be recharged, ideally with batteries I can replace. It's also okay if the device needs to be plugged in while using the device. It's fine if the device has no upgradable software on it so long as what's on the device works reliably. Editing and/or marking up what I'm reading is not required. Does anyone know of a recommendable device that would do these things? I looked in [4]https://ryf.fsf.org/ and [5]https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en and I didn't notice anything named "ebook reader" or similar language. If I've overlooked something I should consider, please do let me know the URL for that device. Thanks. ___ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [6]libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org [7]https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discus s References 1. https://www.newegg.com/PocketBook-International-SA-E-Book-Readers/BrandSubCat/ID-207683-782 2. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=123 3. mailto:j...@forestfield.org 4. https://ryf.fsf.org/ 5. https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en 6. mailto:libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org 7. https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss ___ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
