I'm a Proud Luddite. That's Why I Use Linux

I'm a Proud Luddite. That's Why I Use Linux(thelibre.news)

52 points by eustoria 3 days ago | 14 comments

xacky 3 days ago |

Most Linux distros update more than Windows, it's not a platform where technical progress is restricted. Even other Unix like systems still get lots of updates.

vouaobrasil 3 days ago |

From the article:

> I am just trying to point out that the FOSS movement is not anything new, not really. It is just another manifestation of a drive that has been with us since time immemorial: the thirst for freedom.

I think that was true at one time, but I don't think it is true any more. With all due respect to FOSS, which is great, I think the movement has lost its ways. FOSS has become an industry to itself. If FOSS really still means freedom, why are so many people adopting closed technologies like AI to do open source? FOSS has become more about producing FOSS now, rather than creating software that actually means something. Even Linus Torvalds has used the rationale that his job is to make the kernel a great kernel and if AI can help him do that, all the better.

But I think the spirit of FOSS would be to make software that represents the human spirit, not simply produce it. Yes, there are a few developers who still feel that way, but by and large, technology has warped our way of thinking so that we care more about the final product than what we have to do to get there.

No doubt there's still some momentum of freedom in FOSS, but I think for the most part it's been thoroughly subsumed into the mainstream and it certainly no longer aligns with the Luddite tradition of restraint and keeping things small.

Personally, I've lost all faith in open source.

tmtvl 3 days ago | |

FOSS is an interesting beast in that it's comprised of both Open Source (the Linux kernel) and Free Software (the GNU project). Linus is more pragmatic than Stallman so depending on where you personally fall in the idealistic vs pragmatic scale you may lean more towards either one of their philosophies.

zamalek 3 days ago | | |

These days I sprinkle less salt on Stallman's _software_ ideas, there are many things I thought he was being an idiot about, which very recently became true. But maybe it could Nostradamus-isms: predict enough an eventually something will stick.

tpmoney 3 days ago | |

AI is in a sense the purest form of open source. All information compiled for all to use without restriction, enabling truly anyone to modify any software to work the way they want and just by describing it in normal human terms to their computer. The outputs aren't copyrightable so all the outputs are open source. The court rulings finding AI training to be fair use are probably the biggest blows to the growing copyright regime Disney and the like built over the last few decades that we've seen in a long while. And to top it all off, our corporate overlords are shoveling their data as fast as possible into the machines. Sure they have "no training" contracts on that data, but given how many human institutions have leaked all of their source code over the years, it's only a matter of time before some training AI agent running at Anthropic or OpenAI or Google does an "oopsy" and dumps all sorts of proprietary closed source code into the AIs that everyone has access to.

If anything the biggest blow to FOSS has been the surprising and unexpected heel turn of so many FOSS advocates who have shed their "information wants to be free" hats donned their new "strong copyright and preventing people from using your code without your explicit approval of how they use it is good actually" hats.

krapp 2 days ago | | |

There is a restriction - the useful models are closed source proprietary services that cost money to be used effectively, and those models require vast and expensive infrastructure for training that isn't available to the public. I can't apply the four freedoms to Claude or OpenAI or Grok. I can't fork a billion dollar data center. A bunch of weights isn't the same as source code.

What's more, because people are using these services to generate code they can't understand that code and won't be able to edit or redistribute that code without access to those services.

That's anything but "the purest form of open source." It's even more of a proprietary lock-in than we had to begin with.

vouaobrasil 2 days ago | | |

The problem with your argument is that there is a cost to using AI so it's not really free. There's an environmental and a social cost that restricts the freedom of others, which is technically still open source but not in the spirit of it.

moody__ 3 days ago |

And now GNU/Linux is freely taking money from corporate overlords and ponying up money to frontier model companies. I don't know what possess people to think Linux is still some cool counter culture thing, it's not. It's just still wearing the mask of one because people have selective hearing.

FLeXMurphy 3 days ago | |

I can't speak on everyones behalf and I am not just referencing Linux here, I am also referencing the great family of BSDs, but having the full source available as part of the install is what I'm all about. If that is _counter cultural_ then so be it, but it isn't the main intent. But having the source to the kernel, the OS, the apps I use, complete with stellar man pages and other manuals... I'm set.

moody__ 3 days ago | | |

From the article: >When an individual chooses to use a Linux-based operating system instead of Windows or OSX, they are, deliberately or not, making a statement. They are declaring themselves to be autonomous and independent.

But this is being reversed now and this has gradually been the case over the years. By just using linux are you capable of debugging the kernel? When the code itself grows unbounded in size and complexity, the moat grows more and more. Tomorrow if you had a nasty GPU driver bug or scheduler bug in any of these systems are you personally empowered to make that change? I would argue no. I've had this, I've tried trawling through the kernel to help some nerds debug why ppc64 KVM was not working when running in BE mode and it was completely intractable. I could just be an idiot though, the evaluation of that is left to the reader.

My point with referencing with LLMs is that this has turned this dial up to 11, now you have developers shipping a crap ton of code and complexity is growing more. The more the developers rely on this stuff the more there is this kind of implication that in order for you to keep up you will use it too. Is that carrying the spirit of the luddite?

Also FreeBSD is also taking LLM stuff, OpenBSD doesn't have a policy prohibiting this, NetBSD does.