In light of this Android money-making machine… How is the Free
Software Foundation’s website doing? Are they staying up-to-date on
this news. Now this brings memory back to me. How often have I been
visiting the Free Software Foundation’s websites? I’ve visited
fsf.org a number of times recently, mainly due to interest over
their Respect Your Freedom Hardware certifications. But gnu.org, I
haven’t been visiting that site nearly as much. Okay, now this is
kind of interesting, then. Why don’t I go visit gnu.org for a spin
at how up-to-date its mention of Android is?
Well, well, a cursory front-page analysis leads you to believe that it is primarily about desktop-oriented softwere. Now, I know from closer detail visits in the past that this is not the full story, but that’s the gist you get from the front page.
20180820/https://www.gnu.org/
20180820/https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html
20180820/https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
20180820/https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html
20180820/https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.html
Oh, indeed Android and LineageOS are mentioned in the “why not distros” page, but I see no mention of Replicant on the official front pages. Sure if you dig deeper, there is mention of Replicant being better from the rest, but it is not obvious from a casual first visit.
Ah, and Blag was removed from the endorsed distributions upon the request of the maintainers, stating that it is no longer being maintained and they no longer wish to have it listed.
20180820/https://www.fsf.org/
20180820/https://www.fsf.org/patrons/licensing
But really, I do like the work that the Free Software Foundation is doing, it’s just that I wish the community could grow bigger. I think it’s important to have a critical eye on the software we’re using in our modern-day world, and the Free Software Foundation is one of the important contributors to this. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is also another important proponent, but incidentally I must admit, they too seem to have not grown significantly in community size and activity levels in light of recent events.
One thing I like about the Free Software Foundation is that they are very down-to-earth in their agenda, compared to some other initiatives. For example, the Future of Life Institute. Artificial intelligence threatening the future of human society? That is a little bit too vague and pie-in-the-sky theoretic computer science for the time being, and in fact that is the representation of the founder. But, software freedom by contrast? Not only is that very concrete, but you can prove that the issues pointed out by free software advocates is the lead-up before you get to this artificial intelligence doomsay. The first problem is that people are not understanding how their computers work, even at a basic level: where is the source code for the software you are using? Even if you found it, would you be able to compile and install it into your computer device exactly the same as the manufacturer has done? If you’ve got this down good, you can move onto the next challenge: what is the “source code” of machine learning systems? How do you understand why a machine learning system made a particular decision? If you’ve got the source code for the software, this next challenge should be easy: just make sure you save the source source data so that you can re-train the machine learning in a batch mode and get the same results. But if you don’t even have any of the source code for the software involved or don’t know where to start, you’re really lost. And things can go downhill from here: what started out as a division of work becomes a division of power, some parties can cause actions that negatively affect other parties, but there may be no recourse running the reverse direction.
Ultimately, I think that much of this, well, lack of community participation in proportion to the scale of the issues very much has to do with the issues at hand. Some people say that the human lifetime is relatively short compared to the speed of human conscious thought. When computers are only used for office work tasks throughout a day, you can be pretty sure that it is likely that the computers, when used, capture a lot of human conscious thought. But that is not the computer world we live in today. In today’s world, the means to the end of getting over two billion Android users on Earth was by squeezing every single possible spare minute of time out of the humans who use these devices: Check your E-mail when you’re waiting for the subway, when you’re walking across the hall, when you’re crossing a busy street, when you’re in the driver’s seat and supposed to be driving a car, before you go to bed, and so on and so on and so forth. When you bring two billion of these users together, you end up realizing that they could just as well be much more aimless and clueless than you would otherwise expect from a population of that size. But, that was the means to the end by which Android reached a population of over two billion.
We’ve long but passed the boundary of human consciousness. Suffice it to say, these Android devices reflect a world that is speeding up so much that the idea of human conscious thought playing an active role in today’s computing is left behind in the dust. What software developers previously understood as “solid,” discrete objects in the minds of computer users are now considered “liquids.” The users no longer pick and place these old fashioned concepts, they just pick up a bucket chock full of all of them and carry that around whole.