esonderegger

Under the heading of "be the change you want to see in the world", I'm playing around with the idea of restricting myself to only using free and open-source software in 2017 and blogging about the experience (I know - it's already been done: http://yearofopensource.net/). As an audio/video engineer and more recently as a front-end developer, I've always been a three operating system guy (Linux for servers, Windows in the living room, and Macs for my daily driver/laptop) but recently have found myself using my Linux desktop more and the other platforms less and less.

From a practical perspective, going purely open-source would mean trading OSX for Linux, Sublime Text for Atom, Chrome for Firefox, Photoshop for Gimp, etc. All of that sounds totally doable, but the more I think about it, the trickier deciding what should count as "closed-source" gets. My iPhone is certainly closed-source, but I'm not sure it's even possible to run AOSP on any of the current batch of Android phones. Replacing my phone with a land line feels like taking too much of a step away from society. Facebook and Twitter are both closed-source platforms I could walk away from easily but again, deciding where to draw the line gets tricky. Avoiding Github and only sharing my code via a self-hosted Gitlab CE instance would seem like obeying the letter of the law but against the spirit of the experiment. Avoiding Google services would probably be the hardest but most interesting transition. (is there anyone offering a truly open-source email service? I know I could self-host, but I imagine I'd run into problems with messages being caught by spam filters.)

So I ask you all: what would going purely open-source mean to you? Where would you be willing to compromise and where would you draw the line? Do you think in 2017 it's even a reasonable thing to attempt?

Thanks! And I'm looking forward to reading your responses.