Free and Open Source Software

Just had a lunch conversation today as well and a colleague's iPhone got stolen. I mentioned how the problem of being able to do everything on the phone makes it a single point of failure (back in the day when I traveled I needed internet cafés to login into my brokerage account to sell off some stock. Now I just do it with my phone.). We discussed a bit more how he was stuck and frustrated as all things are done with the phone now (Uber, 2-factor authentication etc.).

But, it was an iPhone, so Apple allowed him to completely shut down and erase his old phone together with all payment info and all other personal info. And then just enter his Apple ID on his new phone (paid by the insurance) and he was back in the game.

If I had my Fairphone stolen, I'd have to somehow recover some parts of my data from my personal backup and the installation process of any new device would take some time. Also, who knows what the thief could've done with my phone?

So yeah, I'm completely opposed to my device being controlled by a corporation to the point they can lock, erase and move all data (including app data) somewhere else, but I do see the advantages.

You touched upon quite a few interesting topics, so I’ll try to summarize a few things quickly (i.e. prepare for a wall of text).

Generally speaking, citizens of various countries around the world pay taxes, and some of that money gets turned into science. Theoretically, those papers should be accessible to all the citizens because they paid for the experiments to be made and the papers written.

However, the story doesn’t end there! Usually, those papers go through a bizarre system where the scientist pays for them to be published in a journal and then the readers also need to pay to read them. IMO this part of the system is very broken, and open access seems like a way to fix it.

If you feel like it’s all just a big scam, then using sci-hub doesn’t really have any ethical problems. If you feel like the system is contributing something important, then paying for it shouldn’t be a problem either. I’m open to both interpretations, but I’m also reading from sci-hub, so I’m not entirely neutral.

I wonder if you friend would argue that scientific journals are a scam and Apple is also scamming people in a way. If that’s the case, it’s a social justice thing, isn’t it?

It’s true that Apple is pretty bad when it comes to right to repair or FOSS. If you believe that more things should be FOSS, then you probably would be using Android products instead. However, that world comes with a long list of problems too, such as privacy, but that’s a story for another wall of text.

However, as far as the philosophy of open source is concerned, Android is slightly better than iOS. If you’re all about supporting open access and open source, it would make a lot of sense to use Android and avoid all Apple products.

Obviously there are other ways to look at this subject. Personally, I would love to use a 100% FOSS electronics, and as far as laptops are concerned, you can go pretty far in that direction. Mobile devices are a very different story though, but that’s a story for yet another wall of text.

I'm an Apple user, and have been since 2007 when I bought my first MacBook. I have an iPhone, a Watch, a bunch of Macs, and Apple TV. I have an iPad too, but the screen's broken, I can't afford to repair it, and honestly, I don't really have much use for an iPad these days.

While I like how much these devices sync with each other, and I love how well they're built, with every year that passes it sits less well with me how, if you can't afford the latest and greatest, you'll experience some level of OS-rot.

I mean, my iPad is new enough to support iPadOS 16, but too old to support Stage Manager. That I'm not really bothered by, but it's indicative of a problem. If the device is capable of running an OS, it should get all of the OS that its hardware will allow. Even more fundamentally though, say iOS 17 has some new additions to Notes.app that will also work in Sonoma, but your Mac isn't recent enough to go beyond Monterey; does that mean you can't view notes made on your iPhone on your Mac?

And yeah, that doesn't sit right with me.

I'm going to give a different and possibly controversial opinion to the others in here. To get started, I admit that I am a daily mac and ios user so there's definitely some bias there. That being said, I think there is a clear difference between the vaccine and information resources and using a mac or iphone. I think there is an incredible need for there to be a free and open source option that exists for everything (especially for public health and information), but not everything needs to be free and open source if a free version exists elsewhere (or even multiple viable free options). Just because I like going to libraries doesn't mean I dislike book stores. As a video editor, I very much disagree with my professional industry basically mandating ProRes, which forces Mac use (or at least it did for a long time), which institutes a costly and sometimes impossible barrier to entry for many people, which is lame because more editing friends in post is always better.

Maybe there's something I'm missing in the argument, but it seems like if a programmer or end user wanted to use open source software, nothing is stopping them, but if a government wanted to implement "open source" vaccines, that wasn't possible because of the patents. Sure, cross-integration would be super nice (airpods on an android, ipad on windows, imessage on everything, etc), but I don't know if it should be an expectation, just like cross-play in video games would be super nice, but shouldn't be an expectation.

I do like tinkering with things though, and that's really my main personal qualm with apple (I know they're a huge megacorporation, but they don't generally make my personal life worse for the most part). I was running a pretty beefy hackintosh for 7+ years before that computer decided to give up. Now I use that hardware for a home media server. I also love tinkering with little linux distributions on my raspberry pi. Apple really doesn't scratch any of these itches for me, but that's why I do both. I have the reliable mac for work and general computing use and I have my other devices for everything else.

Apple is the symbol for a walled garden that feeds it's inhabitants overpriced crap and they love it.

When buying tech products I mainly care about if they are integrated with each other or not.

A lot of people do. That's why apple made sure you can only use apple devices with other apple devices. Bluetooth allows users to share files between any two devices? Better make sure an iPhone can't connect to anything that doesn't have an i prefix in it's name. You like our earbuds, buy an iPhone if you want the buttons to work. Sure, you can play music over the radio from your phone while driving, oh you don't have an iPhone, get fucked.

And it's an effective strategy. You start off with a phone, add a watch and earbuds to it, and the next thing you know you're buying a $1k stand for a $5k monitor to work with your $7k cheese grater of a tower. Because what are you going to do, give up on connectivity, throw away all of your apple devices, or go all the way in on the apple koolaid?

Don't even get me started on the quality of their overpriced crap, or the fact that they've been fighting tooth and nail to keep making ewaste instead of allowing the users to repair and upgrade their devices. Watch any video on the topic from Louis Rossmann.

Tldr

Fuck apple

My main problem with Apple is they really only care about what you've done for them lately.

They have a tendency to obsolete things and force devs to come along for the ride. They killed PowerPC, they killed flash and they're in the process of killing x86. If devs are still around they need to work to catch up. If they aren't, the applications just won't work anymore. Compare this to the backwards compatibility of, say, Windows applications. I like when my applications continue to work.

I also wish they'd never inflicted smartphones upon the world, but I suppose that's a personal gripe.

They everything is so well integrated and the performance per watt of their m series CPUs are genuinely impressive. But for me, their hatred of open source, their unrivalled lobbying against right to repair while green washing about how much they care about the environment, preaching privacy while collecting similar amounts of data as Microsoft and Google (but generally keeping it for themselves and their contractors), and the extreme restrictions they impose on their platforms (especially iOS) means I would never spend money on one.

i dont like apple, but i understand why people do. the ecosystem seems convenient, the promises of privacy, etc. but as a techy person i dont like to use them, it feels too constricting and overpriced. and they havent innovated in a long time (with the exception of vision pro, which although i find ridiculous, at least they finally did something innovative)

@IronTwo Yep. I don't use Apple primarily because their ecosystem is too closed and you gotta register and buy a programming license from them to do any programming.

Screw all that, I'm staying where the ability to program my devices is guaranteed and I can load and run free software if I want and I don't have to get permission from mega-corp to change the apps I run.

This could be a huge philosophical discussion but I think it boiles down to a couple things. First and foremost, we all have to play the game with the cards we’re dealt. We don’t always have the luxury of choosing FOSS in our daily lives simply because of the way our society works. Apple does a great job at making devices integrated into our world that just work with a focus on privacy. I use them for those reasons. Sure some of their stuff is expensive. I didn’t buy my laptop, but it’s my 5th, and the best I’ve ever used. I think it’s worth it for the most part. Phones are on par with other big manufacturers anyway.

Everything else I can I use foss. My main power pc is EndeavorOS. I have another pc running Ubuntu server using docker to host services for myself.

Point is supporting things like the right to repair is important and you should where you can. But when it comes to the devices we need to use to participate in life, I like Apple.

Really jumped in the deep end with your research, huh? :)

I guess a good place to start would be deciding what actually bothers you. Megacorp sucks because of [shitty capitalism, shady labor practices, locking down devices, privacy, insert other complaint]. Weigh those against the benefits you get.

My biggest concern is generally privacy and monetization of my data, but I still use an iPhone because my family wouldn’t get off my case about ease of sharing photos, videos. So I only have the iPhone. Don’t buy anything else from them. I turn off as much tracking and data collection as possible. I only have two outward-facing files in iCloud — my encrypted password keeper so that I can access it both from phones and mobile, and an encrypted file vault that can only be opened if you first get into the password keeper.

FWIW on the FOSS side, I still use Linux. I used to use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 5a that worked otherwise well.

I've been an Apple user now for several years now and I get why someone would choose an Apple product, disregarding their monopolous philosophy. Every device is extremely well made with attention to detail, feels almost worth the money you're paying for. The software is adjusted for every device, on iPad you (most of the time) get software that utilizes the space and not just upscaled mobile software. I'm sure that goes for Android now too, but at least it didn't when I switched. The "ecosystem" works incredibly well, everything can be sychronized and my AirPods connect instantly.

However since I've started going to university my mindset has changed. Now I value repairability over being "Apple chique", I've started becoming more and more attached to the open source philosophy (not only concerning software) and frankly, I don't feel a need for Apple anymore so the drawbacks started weighing heavier. I swapped my MacBook for a ThinkPad running Linux. I don't care about the cloud anymore either - I'm much more happy with having my own, decentralised, cloud. I also feel like I want some change. Apple has become boring to me - but that is a personal taste.