Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

Microsoft got in antitrust trouble for bundling IE for free w/ Windows to compete with Netscape.

Now imagine Microsoft controlled whether Netscape could be installed or updated on Windows, and blocked them, and you are closer to the current situation with phones.

One of the neatest tricks Big Tech ever pulled was convincing people that phones weren't general-purpose computers and should have different rules than laptops or desktops. These rules conveniently give the vendor more control.

Now these rules are moving to laptops and desktops.

@ted The laptops certainly started with that first group originally but has matured into all three over the years. The phone is still early days so it's still primarily getting interest from the FOSS core for now. I expect it will follow the path of the laptops as it matures.

In either case, our desire is to market these products to *everyone* not just FOSS geeks, because it's not only FOSS geeks who deserve privacy, security and freedom.

@ted There are three main categories of customer that map to the legs of the stool.

The traditional FOSS core values our commitment to free software and the fact our hardware fully supports Linux out of the box.

The privacy-focused customer tends to care most about the hardware kill switches and our public commitments to privacy.

Security folks tend to care about code auditability, freed up firmware, Qubes support, and the kill switches.

Some customers are a blend of the three.

@ted Purism currently is trying. Even though the existing FOSS community continues to pigeon-hole Purism into the traditional categories, they would be surprised to discover the parts of our customer base that are outside of the FOSS community and are using Linux for the first time.

We sit on a three-legged stool of privacy, security and freedom and customers come to us based of some combination of those three values.

@ajmartinez @angdraug I think a lot of folks on other platforms still assume Linux on the desktop is the same as it was a decade ago when they switched to OSX and aren't aware of all of the advances.

@twrightsman Their primary goal is to take away disillusioned devs from Macs, but as some of those disillusioned devs might have tried out Linux again after a decade and discovered just how far it's come, I suppose it will have some effect.

It's also a marketing opportunity: "The best Linux development environment isn't Mac or Windows, it's Linux of course."

It's been long enough now that we are back to the pre-golden era world where people don't understand the risks of vendor lock-in and proprietary protocols. To me this means there's an opportunity for a new golden era, if we can get people to appreciate why the "freedom" part of FOSS is so important.

The following era saw priority shift from "freedom" to "open" throughout FOSS. Linux webapp development was primarily done on Macs and that changed how FOSS development happened overall, as devs had to adapt to homebrew libraries instead of curated packages. Dev tools changed to solve the problem of inconsistent library versions between Mac and Linux distros, which ultimately led to docker. I believe the primary reason docker was created was to serve Linux webapp development on OSX.

I'd love to see a history of FOSS in its "golden era" (early aughts) to the early teens. There was this great momentum at the time, giant advances in the Linux desktop and server, and a large focus worldwide on open standards (XMPP became, briefly, the standard chat protocol).

This progress stalled. My theory is that it's in large part due to OSX convincing FOSS developers "it's UNIX" and with FOSS devs on Macs, Linux desktop advances slowed down.

@aral I'll have to admit that I am not fluent in Javascript. My worries were more triggered by the overall concept of data being stored as executable code that was evaled when reading, and what an attacker could do who could write to that database or bypass sanitization attempts, since they would, in theory, have the full range of JS capabilities at their disposal (arbitrary code exec) instead of the more limited set of standard DB queries (data leak).

@aral I have to admit I'm a bit concerned what my good friend Bobby Tables might do with a database that stores data as JS that gets evaled at run time.

@laura My favorite, as a noscript user, is when a paywall site uses JS to enforce a paywall pop-over but their content loads w/o JS.

“I’d be more worried about the camera on your phone than I would be about a drone,” #whynotboth #privacy https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455197/amazon-ring-drone-home-security-surveillance-sidewalk-halo-privacy