> I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.
It rather depends on what that 1% is.
The low-level code is what's most important to be free. If you have free firmware and drivers and operating system but then you still have to run a Windows VM or WINE for an old proprietary app, you can only have problems when running that app.
If you have opaque blobs interacting with the hardware, they can crash the whole system, expose firmware-level security vulnerabilities with persistence and the blobs are specific to a kernel version so when the vendor stops providing updates, you're stuck with an obsolete kernel version with known security vulnerabilities. If anything needs to be free software, it's that.
> This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.
Android is "open source" but then the devices are Tivoized or you run into attestation failures if you actually want to run your own version of it. GitHub literally got bought out by Microsoft. These seem like legitimate concerns.
It rather depends on what that 1% is.
The low-level code is what's most important to be free. If you have free firmware and drivers and operating system but then you still have to run a Windows VM or WINE for an old proprietary app, you can only have problems when running that app.
If you have opaque blobs interacting with the hardware, they can crash the whole system, expose firmware-level security vulnerabilities with persistence and the blobs are specific to a kernel version so when the vendor stops providing updates, you're stuck with an obsolete kernel version with known security vulnerabilities. If anything needs to be free software, it's that.
> This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.
Android is "open source" but then the devices are Tivoized or you run into attestation failures if you actually want to run your own version of it. GitHub literally got bought out by Microsoft. These seem like legitimate concerns.