On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 11:22:33PM -0500, Christopher Havel wrote:
Okay. Forgive me, Luke, for inciting what will inevitably be a stake-burning that will be of such grand proportion as to be visible in space...
...but...
...I have to admit that I just don't "get it".
Let us try to stay civil :)
And not having access to Flash is always an annoyance when it occurs.
Isn't flash already dead? I am quite happy that it gets less and less relevant each day as it appeared to be such a pain in the neck and caused a lot of troubles when switching to Linux years ago.
Even my phone is a Samsung Galaxy S7 - not exactly flying the flag of happy freedom-ness.
Altough I type this reply from a Libreboot T400 (RYF certified) running Debian stable with only the main repo enabled I also own and use a smartphone and a tablet running android.
...and that's kind of where I usually draw the line. If a guven application doesn't 'shoot the cat' -- cause obvious system instability or exhibit other overtly malicious activity during use -- and it performs the task(s) it was designed for, it seems to me it ought to be considered just fine, at least for the most part.
How do you know if the source is closed? :)
There are many (valid) reasons to reject closed source software ranging from "because I can", "I am just curious", "scientific and research", "security", "bad past experience with closed source", "forced upgrades" and so on. I believe that the FLOSS-model is better but it is not the holy grail either. Apparently FLOSS has bugs, security holes and unexpected problems. Errors are a part of our human existence. The internet is full of discussions, essays, blogposts and free books on this topic so I think there is no need to repeat these sources. In the end you have to make this decision for yourself based on your knowledge and critical evalation of your sources.
Yet, almost every message on this list seems to carry with it the implication -- if not express statement -- that if a given application can't be openly audited on a remarkably low level by a random layperson at a random time and place -- leaving alone the fact that most ordinary individuals severely lack the knowledge and education required for that task -- it must therefore be evil and untrustworthy and oh god we can't have any of that sort of thing around here, shoo shoo...
Well, this is a libre centered mailing list and in my opinion a quite friendly one. I have been burned by projects that were "open source" and turned out to require blobs. It can be so hard to find out if certain hardware will require blobs so I find the strict libre approach of eoma68 and this mailing list quite liberating.
kind regards Pablo