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Idiomdrottning - FOSS is so dumb (idiomdrottning.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Don't let the title fool you! This is not anti-FOSS!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I... these are all good points, but... did we read the same article?

Article seems to ignore that FOSS projects tend not to have the budget to create the UX that VC-funded projects can. ... I find prioritizing UX over sharing of source code to be misguided.

The author specifically calls attention to this exact point:

If a weirdo guy moved into your kitchen and blocked you from grabbing a spoon whenever you wanted and instead rented them out to you provided you only ate the gruel he provided, the people who would be most able to see the absurdity in that would be be the people who remember what it was like before. Those who grew up with that system would be “whaddayamean? This is super convienient. I just stick my hand in the kitchen and a spoonful of gruel is shoved into it. Like it, love it, want more of it”. They’d be like “people who don’t have a spoon guy are so gross and so dumb. What the heck are they even? Doing rifling through their own cutlery drawer like some sorta eggheads”.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Honestly i found that whole excerpt to be pretty nonsensical.

Don't see how that relates to what i said and then you quoted but reworded (why?). Plus it all just circles back into "its bad cause the UX is slightly more inconvenient".

If the author had any substance to his argument it wouldn't require laying out a ridiculous scenario just to get the reader to understand what in hell he is trying to say.

He basically tldrs the whole article a few sentences later with " I want it to be easy to use." The author never seriously considers if that's worth the cost.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I think they addressed that point pretty clearly. The author says that just because the user experience of sticking your hand into your kitchen and instantly receiving food is fantastic, doesn't mean that letting someone you don't know live in your kitchen and only eating what they decide to make you is a good solution, especially since it means you couldn't use your kitchen (which I believe is a metaphor for your smartphone) for anything else even if you wanted to. Further, those who believe it's a good solution because it is free and its user experience is good only believe this because they have never known anything else. The author also explicitly states

So that’s the dialectic here. I want people to not have to know about tech stuff. I’m not into the tech-for-tech’s-sake lifestyle. I want it to be easy to use. You just tell the computer what you want and it happens, no need to point and click, let alone configure and make. That’d be great. And hackers and modders could add features and share them and everyone would benefit.

But it’s got to be free, free for reals. Open source, and either decentralized or democratically governed.

The author, I think, is saying that while user experience is a nice goal to pursue, it means nothing if it isn't open source, and you can't go around the carefully-crafted VC-funded fancy-but-restrictive UX if you have the skills to do so. Perhaps it is a reach to say that the author prioritizes open source over good user experience, but I don't think so, and even from the most pessimistic reading of those two paragraphs the author views them as at least equal.

you quoted but reworded (why?).

I quoted and reworded it because I was on mobile and couldn't copy paste from your comment without a lot of hassle, and didn't want to retype everything you had typed word for word. Didn't mean anything by it.