Free Software Foundation Endorses First Product Of 2020: A $59~79 USD 802.11n WiFi Card

[andyprough]

you can't libreboot thinkpad, it's hardware is closed and it can do with you whatever it wants. this is just one large libre circus
surely same card with different name is also known to work

You have no idea what you are talking about on both counts. Old Thinkpads are nearly the only laptops that can be librebooted, and one of the chief problems is that off the shelf atheros WiFi cards rarely work.

This card still has closed firmware as far as I can see, so why did it get RYF? Am I missing something?

If it cannot be upgraded, rms considers it to be hardware, so it's perfectly fine by his standards.

Guess I will wait 'til 2030 for my RYF-certified 802.11ac card.

These need calibration blobs, so it will never happen. You either have to give up on 100% libre setups or stick with unbearably slow 802.11n. Honestly, I would not bother and just use wired connections at all times if I were to have to go back to that old standard. Even at 5GHz it's painfully slow.

[madscientist159]

No, when you look at it the reason Linux never took off on mainstream desktop has nothing to do with license or usability.

It has everything to do with apps.

The Microsoft ecosystem for applications has the most diverse array of proprietary software (and this includes games) of any hardware/OS combination. Before Windows 10 it there wasn't much reason to not just go with the flow and use what everyone else was using, and if you had it installed anyway why not invest further in that ecosystem with more compatible software?

In contrast, companies that started without immediately locking themselves into the Microsoft ecosystem have generally found Linux to work well and to scale without major problems. Who do you think pays RedHat's salaries, for instance?

Don't confuse simple, powerful inertia (accelerated with a good dose of self-perpetiating selection bias from all that backward compatibility goodness) with some sort of convoluted licensing rant. We get you don't like the GPL, but I for one won't release any of my work under a non viral copyleft license. If you don't like those terms then you're free to contact me and negotiate a paid license under appropriately restrictive end user license terms.

[ddriver]

🤣

By "everywhere" do you mean for some sort of embedded (hidden) use?

Because Linux, not BSD, is used at most companies for servers (along with Windows), most phones (Android), cars for their dash OS (both Android and embedded Linux), and lots of other places, etc.

BSD has existed longer than Linux but never really took off.

The GPL 'virus' is what got Linux there, not what impeded its spread.

You should work on your reading and comprehension skills more, and also maybe look up that thing called "sarcasm", so perhaps you can identify it yourself rather than having to be informed of it explicitly.

That's what I've been saying all along - GPL got Linux to where it is, which in the PC market space and end users context is exactly nowhere. The GPL was exclusively good for the enterprise, it didn't benefit society whatsoever, just large corporations that make money on it. How come Linux is so good at meeting the sophisticated needs of the enterprise, yet completely fails to meet the basic needs of the end user? My guess is for the same reason a hammer is good at smashing but not that good for performing brain surgery - it simply wasn't designed for that.

And after a cursory research, it would seem that BSD's mass adoption indeed failed exactly for the first reason I presumed - legal issues. By the time those were worked around, the race was over. Not due to the GPL being a blessing, but due to AT&T being a curse

Surely, if the FSF cared about society as they pompously claim, I'd expect to see something better than 99.9% of society currently being stuck with some proprietary platform instead, in some cases, ironically built on top of FSF endorsed products, and that includes Android too, because that's essentially google's services on top of a Linux kernel, and those are very much closed and proprietary. An Android end user is not a Linux user, regardless of how much Torvalds would want you to believe that. That's end user popularity success for proprietary corporate Google, not for FOS Linux or GPL...

You seem a bit too naive to attribute both the tremendous failure of end users and the tremendous benefit of the enterprise to unfortunate development. The FSF simply went for the money, with a competing, superficially decorated business model that worked rather well as free advertisement. It succeeded because it offered a corporate business model that excluded paying royalties to MS, therefore cutting operational costs and increasing profits.

Nothing in the fundamental design of the FSF or GPL indicates any of the claimed concern for society, there are no safeguards whatsoever against the situation developing into what it is today, on the contrary, the design is in stark contrast to the claimed intent, it worked out exactly as it was designed to.

Either the FSF was truthful and honest about their agenda and tremendously failed at it, or it was never their actual intent but a mere publicity stunt. There is no third option. And the evidence largely points at the latter. At any rate, either way is bad.

Lastly, I do not deny, nor do I have any problem whatsoever with Linux being successful and useful to the enterprise market. If it wasn't for Linux, it would have been something else, it was the right place and time to meet significant enterprise demand, and that's all there is to it. My problem is with the FSF not being open and honest about it. Linux is hands down the more open and technologically superior OS, so what I lament is none of that reached to benefit society directly, because regardless of how good it is as a hardware operating system, it is still as lousy as it has ever been as an end user operating system, which could not possibly be due to accidental misfortune development, not in the face of so much dev hours being spent on countless distros, started with the intent to make a user friendly Linux, so much failure can only be due to design limitations. At the same time, Google a - a big corporation basically manages to succeed at making a user friendly OS on top of it on the first try, which could only mean one of two things - either GPL is tailored to primarily benefit big corporations or we must assume that end user adoption is impossible without the proprietary component, and the latter just doesn't make any logical sense. Claimed to be designed to benefit society and protect it from MS's monopoly, ended up doing the exact full opposite, and in fact, as already mentioned, even mean old MS now sits on its board as a premium member, and reaps more benefits from FOS than society ever has, and likely ever will. Whether you attribute that to design intent, or unfortunate accidental development, or a monumental failure to accomplish the claimed goals, or continue to deny the reality of the matter is up to you. Note tho, that acknowledging problems is the first and foremost step to solving them, impossible to do so without making it.

[pal666]

By "everywhere" do you mean for some sort of embedded (hidden) use?

no, he means his hallucination. linux dominates(top spot, not just "better than freebsd") everywhere except desktops

[pal666]

(a)By this few years old graph it looks like overwhelming majority enterprises with more than 50 employees are using mostly Windows Server. This btw does include intranet servers/servers without outside access.

it doesn't include clouds which are predominantly linux, even azure

(b) Are you SURE Android is "Linux"? Or is it distinct operating system on it's own? Is it "Linux" because it happens to contain modified Linux kernel?

rhel also contains modified linux kernel. android is linux distro, somewhat different from usual desktop distro, but so are linux router distros etc. android kernel changes are pulled back to vanilla, i'm sure most of them already pulled.

But Android also contains bunch of BSD code (libc)?

linux kernel contains bunch of bsd code, so what?

Which part of an OS is deciding and more important, kernel?

kernel. you can have many libcs on one os

(c) "brains" (ECU's) run OSEK variants or run on bare metal - safety critical, that's why. Infotainment can be random mobile and desktop OS. Usually MS (arguably most often), XNU or Android.

microcontrollers can run anything, most of code is in infotainment. and of course it is most often linux. linux is the most used os everywhere except desktop. it is most used user-facing os(there are more androids than desktops). on desktop ms leverages their monopoly to ward off competition, but the only growing desktop segment is chromebooks. it's time for butthurt freebsd lovers to get a rest

[pal666]

Since you don't participate in the FSF forums or other libre software forums Michael, you probably do not understand that the #1 complaint after someone libre-boots an old Thinkpad is that off-the-shelf wifi cards like the ones you describe usually do NOT work.

you can't libreboot thinkpad, it's hardware is closed and it can do with you whatever it wants. this is just one large libre circus

A lot of people would be willing to pay $59 or more for a wifi card that is known to work.

surely same card with different name is also known to work

[aht0]

By "everywhere" do you mean for some sort of embedded (hidden) use?
(a)Because Linux, not BSD, is used at most companies for servers (along with Windows), (b)most phones (Android), (c)cars for their dash OS (both Android and embedded Linux), and lots of other places, etc.

(a)By this few years old graph it looks like overwhelming majority enterprises with more than 50 employees are using mostly Windows Server. This btw does include intranet servers/servers without outside access.

(d)BSD has existed longer than Linux but never really took off.

(d)Wrong, BSD was bit more popular until early 2000's. Then FreeBSD somewhat fucked up it's SMP implementation and 5-RELEASE wasn't overly stable. Lot's of commercial users switched then to Linux, which had more stable SMP at the time and by the time FreeBSD figured out it's SMP around year later, train had already passed - once lost commercial users would not return without compelling reason.

Second thing that allowed Linux to gain great initial momentum was court case of the early nineties (USL vs BSDi) - future of the BSD's looked uncertain and lots of potential users went with Linux because they needed something and didn't/couldn't wait until courts finally decided. Linux had easy breathing space until 1994.

Third thing: Torvalds has said that had there been 386-compatible open-source and free BSD at the time, he would never have started with Linux kernel.
Summary: Success of Linux is thus to a degree caused by handful lucky coincidents.


(b) Are you SURE Android is "Linux"? Or is it distinct operating system on it's own? Is it "Linux" because it happens to contain modified Linux kernel? But Android also contains bunch of BSD code (libc)? Is it then maybe equally BSD (because modified BSD code is equal argument? Or not?) Which part of an OS is deciding and more important, kernel? libc? software around both? license?

(c) "brains" (ECU's) run OSEK variants or run on bare metal - safety critical, that's why. Infotainment can be random mobile and desktop OS. Usually MS (arguably most often), XNU or Android.

[andyprough]

This card still has closed firmware as far as I can see, so why did it get RYF? Am I missing something?

Diluting the RYF trademark with closed firmware systems and devices is not a winning strategy here IMO. I've called for a multi tier system in the past, maybe it's time this happened -- something along the lines of Bronze for blobby firmware systems that at least stay on their side of the IOMMU and have open drivers, Silver for systems that only use minimal firmware blobs that can be reasonably reverse engineered with effort (i.e. a combination of open source and proprietary bits, where the open source bits are the majority of the firmware) , and Platinum for fully open firmware fully owner controlled systems (yes, there's a few on the market now, so the category is justified)?

I'm of course assuming anything requiring a signing key anywhere (regardless of whether firmware or software is locked) should be outright rejected from RYF. If not, the RYF mark would be utterly meaningless.

These are excellent ideas. I doubt they will get implemented, but they would take a lot of the confusion out of the process.