If you thought systemd proponents were bad....


Just imagine for a moment if something like the iPhone App Store approval process was applied to every application for a domain name. Delays and unexplained rejections killing many great ideas before they even get off the ground. In the worse cases, like that of Greg Hughes, the great firewall of the app store has been used to quash ideas that it appears Apple may have been planning to compete with or copy.

If domain applicants had to go through such a process or if other core technologies fell into a rut like that then it would throw Charles Darwin's long established theory of evolution out the window and society would end up eating each other. Once companies had established their position and were happily making money they would do everything possible to stomp out any innovation that may undermine them.

This is exactly the kind of non-evolution that has plagued the telecoms sector for many years now. You don't have to look past the price of a simple SMS to see the truth of this situation. Your 160 bytes can cost anywhere between $US0.10 - $US0.50 throughout the western world, even on a network that is otherwise charging maybe $10 per 1MiB (the equivalent of 6,000 text messages) when roaming.

One of the compelling features of free software is that it empowers innovation and efficiency. Telecoms executives may argue that by charging you these extortionate fees, they are keeping spam out of your phone. Think again: technologies like XMPP and SIP are doing that even more effectively and without any price to pay. Software for managing buddy lists and algorithms for spam detection put those telecoms executives out of a job. If SIP, XMPP or both become dominant, evolution may succeed yet.

Despite having these great technologies available for messaging and multimedia communications and despite having a range of free software success stories in products such as Firefox or whole distributions like Fedora, Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu, non-free communications solutions like Skype and Viber continue to run rampant in the voice and video domain.

As it turns out, this is a very dangerous area for the free software community to neglect.

How many people know somebody who tried running Linux but went back to a proprietary solution so they could use a non-free softphone?

In these cases, it is not the phone software itself that appeals to the user: it is the people that software lets them communicate with, their friends, family, professional community and beyond. For people who don't truly perceive the benefits of free software or those who don't have the confidence or experience to defend those benefits, the power of Metcalfe's law hits them like a tsunami and violently sweeps away all the rest of the free software they had started to use.

While Skype is currently available for some distributions of Linux, it is not free software: amongst other things, there is no published source code and no independent review of the code has been possible. Leveraging the power of Metcalfe's law, the publisher of that software gains significant power over those who choose to install it. Any day now, they could even use it to offer users a one-click "free trial" upgrade to some "Windows Lite" or install other components that obstruct effective upgrades to newer versions of the free operating system. To make an analogy, the potential for dirty tricks in this area is far more scary than the things systemd proponents have been accused of.

For those with an interest in solving these problems or at least giving free real-time communications software a try,

On the init system issue itself

Note: the reference to systemd is not itself an opinion for or against any particular init system in Debian nor is it a suggestion that any one side is badder than any other.