A road analogy only works if it’s their private road which youtube maintains

Their desire to restrict how you interact with their “free” service necessitates eliminating your fundamental ability to tell your computer what to do - not just for “their private road”, but in general. This is what the “war on general computation” is about. (I assume you haven’t watched the talk linked in my earlier comment? there is also a transcript here…)

To be clear, they have not won this war yet - which is why all of the software linked in the body of this post is still able to exist! But, they are continuing to move in that direction and offerings like YouTube Premium are predicated on their (correct) assumption that, for many people, having agency over their own computers’ behavior is already unimaginable.

So, re: your earlier comment:

That feels dystopian in the same way that a car mechanics offering services like brake pad replacements is dystopian, which is to say, a pretty big stretch. My uncle and his buddies would giggle, a la, Hank Hill if anyone suggested taking that stuff to a mechanic. But for 90% of people, that’s the norm.

I’d say this not at all like car mechanics existing and offering brake pad replacement service. Rather, it is akin to it being made intentionally more difficult and/or outright illegal to replace one’s own brake pads - and also to have them replaced by any local mechanic who does not pay a recurring fee to the company that manufactured the car.

see also previous !canada@hexbear.net thread about this: https://hexbear.net/post/7014306

the war on general-purpose computing isn’t akin to car mechanics offering services. if you want a car analogy (😬) it is more like car manufacturers attempting to restrict which roads which cars are allowed to drive on (and selling license keys to enable access to other roads).

google’s offer to accept payment for these “features”^[1] (each and every one of them) is predicated on their assumption that many people are not in control of the software on their own computers.

they haven’t completely won the war yet, but the extent to which their assumption is correct is imo pretty dystopian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outdoor_advertising#Regulations billboards are banned in several cities and, surprisingly, in four entire states of the US.

unclear if this tweet is/was real, but it doesn’t appear to exist now. however via this reddit post (with a less-cropped version of the same screenshot) i found these:

Obviously the criminal here is the person who asked the question and posted a screenshot of the answer.

deleted by creator

Thanks. Sorry to see my assumption was correct; that does indeed sound a lot like when they were called OSSO two decades ago.

Notably absent from the list of things they might open source soon is their current “Lipstick” UI, the graphical shell itself.

All of the stuff they plan to open source are things I didn’t even figure out were still closed from my 5-10 minutes of research before writing my previous comments. It is difficult to estimate the number (do you know how?) of other small closed components which they can dribble out over the next years to maintain users’ false hope that they will one day have an actually-open-source operating system.

we’ll see though

my advice is: don’t hold your breath.

Sorry if this sounds bitter, but it’s because I am - I naively believed that OSSO might actually ship a free OS one day (to be fair they didn’t say they would either, but they helped us believe that they might… in effect saying “we’ll see” for years while releasing bits here and there) and it was frustrating to realize that it was never a real possibility.

Got a link about it? Have they just said they plan to make it “more” open, or do they actually plan to make the full OS actually be free software, like AOSP, pmOS, or most of the other things on, eg, the pinephone software page? (note that sailfish is also listed there, but iiuc its UI and some other bits remain closed-source).

It is the direct descendant of Nokia’s OSSO (“Open Source Software Operations”) division, both in terms of people and software.

(ref)

Unfortunately they’ve been saying on and off that they plan to slowly open source more of it literally since they first started… which was [checks calendar] now 20 years ago. So, I lost my optimism that they would ever finish opening it quite a while ago.

roger… Roger? roger.

the correct spelling is zealand

fair point, i’ll try to refrain from it next time

and we’ll open source the hardware and software interface specs so anyone can design, 3D-print, or produce their own modules

oh cool, people can make open source “other half” add-ons for the proprietary “first half” of the phone itself 🙄

i wonder what percentage of jolla customers still mistakenly believe SailfishOS to be open source? (most of the ones i’ve met did…)