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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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libre
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Welcome to libre
A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
Resources
- Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
- Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in
$CURRENT_YEAR, flock to Linux Mint!; Apple Silicon users will want to check out Asahi Linux.
Rules
- Be on topic: Posts should be about free software and other hacktivst struggles. Topics about general tech news should be in the technology comm or programming comm. That doesn't mean all posts have to be serious though, memes are welcome!
- Avoid using misleading terms/speading misinformation: Here's a great article about what those words are. In short, try to avoid parroting common Techbro lingo and topics.
- Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
- All site-wide rules still apply
Artwork
- Xenia was meant to be an alternative to Tux and was created (licensed under CC0) by Alan Mackey in 1996.
- Comm icon (of Xenia the Linux mascot) was originally created by @ioletsgo
- Comm banner is a close up of "Dorlotons Degooglisons" by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0) for Framasoft
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
News stories such as these are helpful to the free software movement since they provide a very renewed sense of mainstream legitimacy to the project. I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a very common occurrence later down the line as the feature ceiling for proprietary apps shit the bed with "AI" grifting and SaaSS subscription models while libre apps slowly catch up.
In the GIS space, open source is leagues ahead of the alternatives in terms of extensibility, usability, and stability.
ESRI still maintains a pretty large stranglehold on the industry and their software is still the easiest to use in terms of UI and such, but they've totally dropped the ball in terms of scripting and maintaining easy to use developer tools. Opting to keep as much of that internal as possible and make government and companies reliant on their incredibly expensive (and buggy) solutions.
Meanwhile, Geopandas, QGIS, and postgis, even DuckDB spatial are running circles around their development tools. 10x faster, 100x easier to write, and built in a way where the whole tool chain is open and never ducks into a compiled and encrypted binary for licensing checks and black box calculations.