I think it’s important to have boundaries. If we keep our operating systems fully free, it will be harder for anyone to pressure us to add proprietary components to them. But if our OSes already contain non-free components, it’s not that hard to add more. We not only want freedom, we also want to keep it.

It also needs to be clear for the people in our community that our main goal is freedom and getting rid of proprietary software. Convenience is less important.

I didn’t say that I’m never going to install any firmware updates. I just don’t want to put it in my system if it’s proprietary.

The world won’t change itself. If people did nothing 40 years ago, there wouldn’t be a Free Software movement.

It sounds like you are not using a fully free distro anyway. Most of the popular distros contain proprietary firmware, so what’s the problem?

I am forced to keep proprietary firmware in my OS to use the hardware and that’s what you are advocating for. You want everyone to be forced to do that. But I don’t want anything proprietary in my system. I see no reason why I should have a proprietary firmware package installed for my GPU to work. The firmware could be just on the device itself and if someone wants to change it, then they can install the package in their OS. But maybe there could also be some other way.

You don’t know what the proprietary update contains. It can be a security fix, but also a backdoor. People can decide on their own if they want to update, but I see no reason why I must be forced to have proprietary stuff in my system. I want a fully libre distro. I can’t switch to one, because I would have to give up on using AMD GPUs, because people like you say that this is fine.

But nobody is saying that there shouldn’t be a way to update firmware. Firmware just shouldn’t a be part of the OS, unless it’s free. Adding proprietary components to our systems will only make it harder for us to keep our freedom.

The FSF’s stance is just based on our current capabilities. Most people still use proprietary operating systems. We are capable of developing free alternatives of non-free programs, even very complicated ones. But it’s not realistic to think that we can currently replace all firmware for any device if we don’t know how it works. The amount of products that have the RYF certificate is already very small. Even Librem 5 didn’t manage to get it. When it becomes easier, I’m sure they will change the requirements or add more levels.

I’m pretty sure Libreboot contains proprietary firmware now and GNU is planning to develop an actually libre fork. So it’s silly for the developer to criticize the FSF for not being radical enough. It makes me think that the person doesn’t really believe in what they are saying.

But then the author says they want us to have proprietary firmware packages in our systems. So they want our OSes to be less libre… They even compare not including proprietary firmware to burning books… I stopped reading after that.

Free Software gives you the 4 essential freedoms. One of them is the freedom to distribute the program. So anyone could legally give you a copy for free. Sounds like what you want, no?

Even if the authors implement some kind of DRM, any programmer can modify the program to remove that feature and share the modified version with everyone. Technically that is also possible with non-free software, but it’s illegal, pretty difficult and requires special skills.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html

We’ve had a way forward for 40 years and it’s called Free Software: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

It’s super weird to me that pirates aren’t advocating for the Free Software movement. Being able to control their own devices should be like one of their main goals.

Even The Linux Foundation has a twitter

Because Linus Torvalds doesn’t care about the Free Software movement and user freedom. It’s why his kernel is still on GPL2.

Ah, I see. So you are an expert in psychology, marketing and statistics. That is truly amazing. It’s completely irrelevant to the topic of our discussion (which is about privacy and software), but very cool.

Fun fact: both facebook.com and twitter.com have a Tor site to make it harder to censor them.

We are judging lemmy.world admins based on their decisions and inaction is also some kind of a decision. Facebook is a threat and they’ve decided to not treat it seriously.

Probably, but they raised the cost for us, so we should do the same to them. Maybe we would eventually reach a point when companies using that product decide that it’s not longer worth it to pay X amount of money for a game to be “protected” for only Y amount of days. I think that should be the goal. To raise the costs, to make DRM as impractical for them as possible.

Yes, there are many things that people should be taught at school. Technology is just one area. All of the things you said are also very important, but it doesn’t make what I said invalid.

Knowing marketing, for example, wouldn’t cause someone to be fooled to the point of saying something like this:

But they should know what cryptocurrencies and AI are, since those technologies are slowly becoming a part of our lives.

Fooled by what exactly? A distributed ledger or machine learning? I think it’s a simple fact that those technologies are becoming more popular.

You make it sound like the problem is technology.

The post is about privacy and software. It’s important for people to be educated in other areas as well, but they weren’t the topic of this discussion. So there was no point for me to mention them.

You’re focusing on a single channel of abuse.

I make software, so I talk about software. I’m not an expert in the other areas that you mentioned.

More people working on breaking Denuvo would mean more cracked games and more vulnerabilities being found. Even if Denuvo team could keep up with that, it would be extra cost for them.

Perhaps, but more people knowing how it works would help find new ones faster.

Yes and how is the developer supposed to earn their money when they can’t spy on people and insert ads?!!!!!!!1111