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> Imagine the carpenters were like programmers. You bought a chair. You bought it because you've inspected it and found out that it fulfills all your needs. The
by gkya 9y ago
> Imagine the carpenters were like programmers. You bought a chair. You bought it because you've inspected it and found out that it fulfills all your needs. Then, every other day, the carpenter turns up at your place and makes a modification to the chair.
505 Bad Analogy. Carpenters work all the time on new designs and better chairs. When a programmer releases a new version of his program, it's like when the carpenter made a new chair and put it up on sale on Amazon or ebay (aren't these kind-of like package managers for physical goods?). You may want to buy that new one, but you may also not. Similarly, nobody forces software upgrades down your throat. But sometimes the people change, they want to sit on divans or nail-beds instead of chairs, the carpenters follow the trends and produce those instead of chairs, and people expect to find these when they come to visit you. You can say "sit on chairs or f*ck off!", but you can't avoid the consequences: loneliness. Similarly, you can hold on to your select programs in select versions, maybe backport patches for them, but the protocols change, the services change, world goes on. You may say eff-off and stick to your programs, but the consequence is that it'll become harder to share experiences and information with others, both ways. Nobody fixes or modifies your stuff should you not want them to, they may try hard to sell and bug you, but you always are the one that buys. Mobile phones do by default, but you can opt-out.
- nfriedly 9y ago> nobody forces software upgrades down your throat Windows 10 does, as does every SaaS web app out there.
- gkya 9y agoBut isn't that a bit like sitting on someone else's chair? You can't control things you don't own.
- fasquoika 9y agoThis seems like the kind of question liable to open a whole can of worms about free software and what it means to "own" a program
- gkya 9y agoI don't think so, as this comment won't be seen all that much; but I'd say that that's a can of worms that we should open.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- derefr 9y agoYeah, I'd compare that more to living in a hotel, and coming into your room every day to find that the hotel has replaced the chairs. The hotel, here, is the web service, or your OS's package manager If you have a problem with constantly changing chairs, you're free to find a new hotel that doesn't do that—probably one with "LTS" in the name.
- gkya 9y agoI was referring to individual software packages, an entire distro is a bit of a different beast. Going with the same chair analogy, well, you'd mostly care about the chair in your room, no? The one that you use the most. That's similar to what I do with Ubuntu (and any other OS): it takes care of all the programs except Emacs which I compile myself following master, Firefox Developer Edition which I'll use until 57 comes out, and my scripts and utilities that I've written. It's impossible to micro-manage every bit of software I directly or indirectly use, but it's a nice trade off to ensure the most important bits myself and trust the rest to the distro maintainers.