cardinal io on Nostr: @{fabio@manganiello.social} >This isn't a technical debate yes indeed, it is ...

@{fabio@manganiello.social}
>This isn't a technical debate

yes indeed, it is absolutely not a technical debate. let me express why i think so while otherwise completely disagreeing with you. (:

>Of course I wish that the world had gone differently, I wish that Nokia and Maemo/MeeGo had succeeded and we would all be using Debian-baed mobile devices today, but unfortunately that's not how things went.

No corporation will willingly do anything good for the community unless it really makes sense for them.

I myself had these dreams of Maemo/Meego (early maemo user here) and hopes for big corps to do the right way and not be evil. I myself was bringing people to google naively, because i knew google talk has interoperability with jabber, so i will be able to chat with them by not having a google account.

That's indeed a lost cause - to rely on corps to do something good.

However the opposite happened in case of Linux kernel. We - the community, had the GPL license. And the kernel was distributed via GPL. In the beginning nobody cared. But the people were contributing to it. Not in order to be a first OS on desktops or servers. Just for themselves, by solving their small problems and for them to use it. On their desktops or servers.

Then it so happened that corporations realized: it is better to use that. It matures, and it is better than other commercial Unix systems in many respects. In which respects it is not better? We'll invest in it and make it better then. But on the other hand, they could not keep the improvement only for themselves.

Silicon Graphics had to bring multiprocessing and XFS file system to Linux and forget about their Irix. Because they would not be able to keep up with the development of Linux kernel.

So now I use XFS on my dekstops!

NSA had to open source SELinux - not because they wanted it, because it was too costly to not do so. It made sense. So now Iran can use it, not exactly what NSA dreamed of probably, right? But it still made sense to add it to Linux kernel.

How Nokia perceived Maemo? It is obvious when you look in to their design decisions, I think. I do use Maemo-Leste today, and i see what they did.

First of all, they didn't build Maemo on top of Debian. They forked debian! They were not interested in a thing that would be good for users: have a Hildon desktop over upstream Debian. They did their own fork. So Debian repos were incompatible with Maemo repos. You could not just connect Debian repos and install something.
Or how did maemo solve problem of onscreen keyboard input? By very ugly way: they forked GTK and Qt and shipped GTK and Qt versions with Maemo that had special hacks so that their keyboard would work. But their keyboard would not work on normal GTK and Qt. In Maemo it only worked because of modified Gtk. And it would not work with tk programs. Or FLTK programs.

So Nokia perceived Linux as "open source": cheap way to build a product without spending much money for R&D. That approach would not bring us a system we would want to use. And it gradually became worse: Harmattan already had AEGIS in kernel, and only their kernel could run programs signed by Nokia, like maps. If you wanted other kernel: then you would not be able to use Nokia's proprietary apps. About the same Google tries to do now.

There is a strong incentive to do such things, if you're a company.

What i think: well GTK is not that good now? Our apps aren't as good or useful? Or our uis? Well why does it matter? We can use them and we can build our community mobile linuxes. We can use them. That's all what matters. I don't use Android, I don't have one. Why would I?

Yes, I understand that majority of people can't use mobile Linuxes. But if we contribute to APK world, we also contribute to the Android locked down world. I believe that the decision indeed is not technical, it is very political. We ignore Android. We don't know what is that. For us it doesn't exist. We contribute, and by that we invite and encourage other devs to contribute to the world of mobile Linux - of truly open systems - unlike Sailfish.

I think it is a non technical and political question. Yes it is hard. Yes we won't have results early! Maybe never. But does it matter? We decide that ethically we have to do this work, not that work. Ethically we don't want to contribute a yota to the Android ecosystem because at the end of the day it still benefits Google and big tech, and makes it sometimes less painful to live under Android, but that is still Android and it is still controlled by Google.

I only get encouragement when I learn how Google now tries to limit its users.

Because to me that is not a way to go.

You know, if you decide this is your way, you are going to that city, let's say. You want to reach that city. Then apparently it so happens that well the road is in bad condition, then your tire explodes, etc etc. Do you change your decision and go to the city you don't want to be in?

No! You just repair the tire, and make your hard way till you reach your real desired destination. So to me this is very ethical and very political and not at all, as you said, technical, indeed.

I expressed this not exactly to change your mind, but in part to share thoughts, and in part to express the alternative approach for the interested folks.