Remote attestation is the true enemy of your freedom. The power of the authoritarian corporatocracy to force you to use only the (entire) systems they control. It's worth reading https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html again just to see how prescient Stallman was.
I think it’s also worth asking why he didn’t have more impact despite pretty clearly seeing this problem. Part of the answer has to be resource disparities but I don’t think it’s just that - Linux didn’t really capitalize at all on Microsoft’s lost decade, and much of the innovation in security has happened on other platforms. I think there’s also some kind of blind spot in the open source community where a lot of people see this as something other people need, not them personally.
I've been saying this ad nauseum forever and I'm not the only one.
A related problem is that the OSS world is mostly tech enthusiasts. It's like having car people design cars. They'd be full of special switches and options and stuff that car people want. Car people don't understand that most people hate cars. What they like is mobility. Same goes for computers. Most people hate computers. They just like what computers let them do: communication, making content, getting their work done, etc.
Normies should be eating our table scraps, not dictating how the software is written.
Normies learned how to drive a car. They can learn how to properly compute. And if they don't like the tech, they don't have to use the tech.
OSS is the last bastion of computing for people who know/like computing, because the armies of "designers" aren't selfless enough to donate their time like programmers are. And frankly it is better off that way, the prevailing trends in design seem to be all about limiting options.
Hard, powerful software over push-button appliances any day.
And, to use the car analogy, BMW gets away with this approach just fine.
Smart people are a surprisingly small minority.
"No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." - H. L. Mencken
I know plenty of people, myself included, who lost money overestimating peoples intelligence.
Everything nice that they offer eventually gets changed or taken away.
Yes, I'm bitter. We could have a much better world, one that actually empowers anyone willing to step up to the plate, but instead we grab all the low-hanging fruit so we can make them smile and step on workers' rights to deliver them burritos, instead.
A happy cohort is an obedient cohort, amiright?
So the real market is for the very smart people and that’s an even smaller minority.
I built super advanced tech but was intentionally screwed over by my large corporate customers, just because they could, so I quit the industry and that super advanced tech doesn’t exist anymore. Unfortunately a lot of really cool things will live and die with me. I’ve fought the good fight and failed.
We can lament that people are not smarter but there isn’t anything we can do about it.
Learning is hard, it makes people uncomfortable, sadly. Which means that the easy road is to stoop to their level, which is what we're seeing.
It sucks that you got screwed by large corporations, and I don't know the story, but that sounds more like standard business fuckery than "software for smart people"?
Certainly the businesses were not as smart as they thought they were, which is a common problem. But they indeed have very hard valuable problems and basically everyone involved was much smarter than the average person. Just not smart enough to know their own limitations and accept outside help.