We misunderstand the strengths of the commons of tools and not knowing how we play to our strengths.

Free software today is usually promoted through big brands like libreoffice, gimp or firefox. These are successful in terms of branding, but is not playing to the strengths of the commons. In the commons, we move away from the walled and towards the interconnected.

The strenghts doesn’t lie in bloated and branded tools, but rather in the small tools that anyone can make if they have some spare time. We need to reframe away from the bloatedness to the caresome. Where the tools are easily made, available by birth and easily tinkerable.

And we need towards the descriptive instead of the branded. Towards letting words dictate tools instead of tools dictating words.

Today operating systems revolves around the branded, bloated and wasteful. The lokening is to move towards operating systems that inbosoms the caresome and descriptive.

  • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    I’m not trying to be mean here, but if I’m reading the meaning of this post correctly, it feels like you really haven’t dived that far into open source. There are thousands of FOSS projects that do exactly as you say, and yes, some get branded and bloated.

    But like… that doesn’t mean that what is out there needs to strip away anything. It just means that you have to keep looking and possibly contributing even if its just reporting bugs.

    For example, Firefox. Have you even checked around? Falkon, Qutebrowser, Ladybird (still in alpha), Nyxt; there’s a handful of QTWebEngine browsers already doing just fine. Not to mention the plethora of stripped down Firefox forks for both desktop and Android like Fennec, Ironfox, Floorp, Firedragon, and Zen. There’s also a stripped down base Chromium browser, which I believe is de-Googled.

    I’m just not quite sure what you want to achieve here.

  • Joe@discuss.tchncs.de
    3·
    2 months ago

    The true strength is in the open interfaces and common protocols that enable competition and choice, followed by the free-to-use libraries that establish a foundation upon which we can build and iterate. This helps us to stay in control of our hardware, our data, and our destiny.

    Practically speaking, there is often more value in releasing something as free software than there is to commercialising it or otherwise tightly controlling the source code… and for these smaller tools and libraries it is especially the case.

    Many bigger projects (eg. linux kernel, firefox, kubernetes, apache*) help set the direction of entire industries, building new opportunities as they go, thanks to the standardization that comes from their popularity.

    It’s also a reason why many companies release software as open source too, especially in the early days, establishing themselves as THE leader…for a while at least (eg. Docker Inc, Hashicorp).

    • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      2 months ago

      Instead of Firefox we need hundreds of stripped down browsers some first year CS students cobbled together in their basement for browsing the web.

      Or something like that, I didn’t quite follow either.