We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom (2016)
1. We -- as in, geeks -- won the DRM battle for MP3 stores. We have, however, so thoroughly lost the DRM war people barely care it&#x27;s there. All your streaming services -- Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc -- are using DRM and no one even fights this any more.<p>2. We won the battle for Linux -- and have thoroughly lost the free software war. No matter how you count, it is, by far, by very far, the most used operating system. A year ago there were <i>three billion</i> active Android devices, all of them using the Linux kernel -- and the overwhelming majority of them only allows sanctioned apps to be installed. There is no freedom any more. And despite the phones have capable CPUs, practically no one uses it to develop software, the entire development ecosystem is completely absent from Android. By any means you should be able to attach keyboard, mouse and monitor and develop and deploy your own phone apps but who does that?<p>2a. In the web server space, once again, it&#x27;s Linux all the way. Although w3tech only says &quot;unix alike&quot; for the 80% it reports it&#x27;s not unreasonable to think the overwhelming majority of that is Linux. But, guess what? increasingly all of that is in a cloud data center where your control is ... limited.<p>3. We won the battle for browsers -- everything now runs on top of an open source rendering engine. But, do I need to mention how much we lost the war here? Because neither Safari nor Chrome are open source and what else has any market share whatsoever? And in a familiar manner, they restrict of what you can install on them.