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– We collaborate inside proprietary environments Why is that? Why have users chosen those environments? Assume they are rational beings, and get at the heart o

– We collaborate inside proprietary environments Why is that? Why have users chosen those environments? Assume they are rational beings, and get at the heart of it. Ask: "How can we address the actual user needs while supporting our goals?" – Many Linux and FOSS geeks today use Linux only professionally Same answer as above. – We're not modeling our values WHY? (Hint: "the use of nonfree" is not, and has never been a primary human motivator even for many people who "get it".) etctera. Finally, regarding the below... only one of these, the first, even tangentially touches on the user experience. There's an implied expectation of so much FOSS advocacy which reduces to "by writing and using our software, you will be wearing a hairshirt for the cause". This mindset is guaranteed to fail in front of users, who are by and large "non-believers". "Having real-time chat is absolutely essential to the advancement of free software." "We're the resistance now." "We need to create mass movement." "Volunteer to write free and open code, to participate in communities." "If you didn't live the history, learn from those who did." "If you did learn from history, teach those who need to know it. Respectfully." "Be patient. Remember that the tortoise won not only because it was patient, but because it ignored insult, ridicule and dismissal." "Model your values. Use free software and hardware." "Remember always how 'the rights to copy, share, modify, redistribute and improve software' are fundamental rights that matter to people." "Work to convince developers that their software freedom matters."

kazinator 7y ago
> Why have users chosen those environments? Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought. But in this case, those users are not just any old end users; the are actually supposed to be FOSS developers, so there is a heavy irony there. I think what is doing on is that large numbers of people are now "reluctant" FOSS developers. They do FOSS because someone told them to. They got a job somewhere and the job involves writing code that gets upstreamed somewhere and is redistributable. Well, they don't give a damn about that, it's just a job, no different from working on proprietary software. Or they work on some proprietary stuff, but it interacts with and depends on some FOSS pieces so they get in there and make changes out of necessity, and those changes are freely licensed only because they are derived from a work which requires that due to copyright doctrines about derived works. It's partly a generational thing. Notice how Doc Searls looks about fifty-something. He remembers a grassroots free software movement which was about actually about displacing proprietary software and liberating the user, and not about about providing reliable commodity middleware for locked-down devices and cloud services. If you were born after 1990, you don't know a world in which Linux and other FOSS wasn't used for making locked-down tech, and proprietary web sites that lock in millions of people and step on their privacy. So of course it's hard to understand someone like Doc Searls. The free software ideology originated in a world in which you still installed applications locally and ran them on local data, on a machine where you were allowed to stick in a floppy disc with any piece of machine language in its boot sector that could easily take over the machine. The machine that was understood to be owned by you once you paid for it.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Its more like if it takes 12 clicks to do it but I was shown how to do so at school/work, or it was preinstalled I will keep on clicking.
- Drdrdrq 7y ago
  >> Why have users chosen those environments? > Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought. Convenience always wins. Always. Users do care about free (as in beer) and they care if the product or service will disappear without warning (hello Google!). But the definitions of FOSS are so strict that they harm developers, and thus products, and thus convenience for users. OP is describing the symptoms of this phenomena.
  - the_af 7y ago
    > Convenience always wins Yes, but convenience also leads to greedy "algorithms" prone to getting stuck in local maxima. Convenience can make us lazy and choose the wrong long-term solutions. This applies to more things than just tech ("convenience" may make us choose foods that are wrong for our health, for example).
  - kazinator 7y ago
    Traditional free software developers do not use the most convenient program without caring about freedom. Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator. GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it. (I've only ever used GIMP since 1996; I have no idea about Photoshop and don't care; it's not free, won't use it.) People went through all sorts of inconveniences to use free software, like manually figuring out monitor clock timings to stick into their X configuration, building their own custom kernels and whatnot. You can't say "convenience wins" with a straight face; that's like saying free software doesn't exist.
    - 7y ago
jseliger 7y ago
An excellent point. FOSS has long been great at underlying tech, freedom, and openness, and terrible at UI/UX and ease-of-use. That's been true for a long time and still seems to be true today. The reasons for this are much-debated and well-known, yet the underlying challenge persists.
- kazinator 7y ago
  Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech, and those are the people who write free software for themselves and others like them. (Why would you spend months making some UI that in the end requires a minute of manual labor to do what some piece of syntax in a config file achieves in seconds, and which can be diffed to the previous version and so on.) There are good examples of UI in free software. There are also terrible examples of UI in proprietary software. A lot of the peculiar user experience in GNU/Linux is that way because it was cloned quite exactly from a proprietary system called Unix. A lot of that bad user experience is standardized with an IEEE standard called POSIX, which isn't free.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    > Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech The widespread love of the Mac and OS X among techies on HN says otherwise.
    - kazinator 7y ago
      True, and that includes me. My favorite thing to say about bad UI is "those designers should spend two weeks using a Mac from 1985". :)
    - mrob 7y ago
      It says nothing about whether it's optimal or not. You can't easily evaluate how good a UI is for expert users until you're an expert yourself, and once you've made that effort, will you really want to abandon all that hard-won skill to learn another system? I think many people use sub-optimal UIs because the short-term cost of learning a different one, which might not even be better, is too high.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
> Assume they are rational beings, and get at the heart of it. Except: They aren't, so you won't get at the heart of it if you make that assumption. People simply are extremely short-sighted. People choose the "convenient" proprietary solution for the same reason that they elect the "convenient" dictator or for the same reason that they choose the "convenient" SUV ... what all of those choices (and countless others) have in common is that long-term costs are simply ignored when making the decision. It's actually just a lie that proprietary software is more convenient. What is true is that it (oftentimes) is more short-term-convenient, i.e., you will save some time/effort right now. But the pretty much universal goal of the proprietors of proprietary software, and in particular of proprietary platforms, is to use that short-term convenience (which they optimize for) to establish themselves in a position of power, which they then use in the long term to maximize the profit while inconveniencing those they have managed to gain power over in any way that promises profits. The most pernicious form of that long-term inconvenience is the "invisible inconvenience", namely the inconvenience that results from hindering innovation by hindering competition: It's inconvenience that you never notice because the more convenient alternative simply never gets developed, so you never get to experience the difference between what you do have and what you could have.
jhoechtl 7y ago
> Many Linux and FOSS geeks today use Linux only professionally As a long time FOSS and Linux user I can tell you that usability of FOSS GUI systems has repaidely degraded in comparison to professional systems (Mac OS or Windows). If half of my hardware is defunct under Linux I will not use the FOSS. It's like buying anew car and being unable to switch to fourth and fifth gear or use the built-in entertainment system. The Wayland fork hasn't contributed to this situation.
floatingatoll 7y ago
FOSS does not appear to value user accessibility as a priority. Non-IRC, non-XMPP chat systems continue to implement features that users enjoy and appreciate, while IRC/XMPP clients argue that those features are irrelevant because the ideals of IRC/XMPP should take precedence. IRC has, in the past ten years, fallen behind on: - Scrollback syncing (client-to-client) and persistence (server-to-client) - Everyday user interface (mIRC ships a UI from 1995) - Setup and configuration (I can't get SASL right on the first try and I helped upgrade an IRC network to support it) - Authenticity at a network level (not just Anope setting a umode) - Protocol resilience (netsplits should not be visible to users) - Defense against attackers (pitting the idealism of anonymity against the safety of identity) Why has FOSS allowed itself to be eclipsed by closed-source chat providers in these regards? I believe it's because the ideals of FOSS are now in direct conflict with the needs of modern users, including FOSS people themselves. For example: - Anonymity is an ideal to be held up above all others, so defending against spam attacks is impossible, because anonymous users are granted equal rights as my friends. - Accuracy is an ideal to be held up above all others, so preventing netsplits is impossible, because the clients must know when they don't have a realtime immediate connection to each other. - Maximally-capable UX is an ideal to be held up above all others, so building a less-capable UX that is more widely easier to understand is impossible, because otherwise we might not be able to view our chat at the maximum information density possible. - Local-only data is an ideal to be held up above all others, so scrollback syncing must be outright prohibited and campaigned against, because otherwise the clients would expect the server to help them exchange data that the server must never permit itself to hold. If FOSS realigns its ideals with those of modern users such as ourselves, then it could easily retake the gap covered in the past decade by closed-source software. I hope with all my heart that it does so someday, but I'm not holding my breath. Footnote: Apologies for all the whitespace but, ironically, HN doesn't support formatted text such as bulleted lists, nor does IRC. This would take up half as much vertical space on your screen on Slack :)
- frobozz 7y ago
  Chat (and communications in general) is a tricky field to evaluate for this sort of thing, due to Metcalfe's law and related effects. I also don't think it would be easy for the gap to be retaken (for the same reason). I use Slack, Facebook, Twitter etc. because I want to communicate with other people who use those services for communication. If I only use IRC and email, I would miss out on some of that communication. I don't know the various reasons why each of those people use them, and I agree that it is, in part because of some of the things you mention. However, it is also probably also down to marketing. Many people use XMPP via Whatsapp without knowing it, they are just using Whatsapp. The user accessibility problem is not universal to all FOSS. In my opinion, LibreOffice (MPL) is a superior office suite in terms of usability to MS Office. Audacity (GPL) has a simpler UX than many proprietary audio editing suites.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
We don't have an internet that functions as intended. IPSs conspired to prevent residential users from running servers. The result is that everything free either needs a patron to cover expenses or be monetizable.
claudiawerner 7y ago
>Assume they are rational beings, and get at the heart of it. Why? Why import the concept of homo oeconomicus into this discussion?

kazinator 7y ago

> Why have users chosen those environments? Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought. But in this case, those users are not just any old end users; the are actually supposed to be FOSS developers, so there is a heavy irony there. I think what is doing on is that large numbers of people are now "reluctant" FOSS developers. They do FOSS because someone told them to. They got a job somewhere and the job involves writing code that gets upstreamed somewhere and is redistributable. Well, they don't give a damn about that, it's just a job, no different from working on proprietary software. Or they work on some proprietary stuff, but it interacts with and depends on some FOSS pieces so they get in there and make changes out of necessity, and those changes are freely licensed only because they are derived from a work which requires that due to copyright doctrines about derived works. It's partly a generational thing. Notice how Doc Searls looks about fifty-something. He remembers a grassroots free software movement which was about actually about displacing proprietary software and liberating the user, and not about about providing reliable commodity middleware for locked-down devices and cloud services. If you were born after 1990, you don't know a world in which Linux and other FOSS wasn't used for making locked-down tech, and proprietary web sites that lock in millions of people and step on their privacy. So of course it's hard to understand someone like Doc Searls. The free software ideology originated in a world in which you still installed applications locally and ran them on local data, on a machine where you were allowed to stick in a floppy disc with any piece of machine language in its boot sector that could easily take over the machine. The machine that was understood to be owned by you once you paid for it.

michaelmrose 7y ago
Its more like if it takes 12 clicks to do it but I was shown how to do so at school/work, or it was preinstalled I will keep on clicking.
Drdrdrq 7y ago
>> Why have users chosen those environments? > Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought. Convenience always wins. Always. Users do care about free (as in beer) and they care if the product or service will disappear without warning (hello Google!). But the definitions of FOSS are so strict that they harm developers, and thus products, and thus convenience for users. OP is describing the symptoms of this phenomena.
- the_af 7y ago
  > Convenience always wins Yes, but convenience also leads to greedy "algorithms" prone to getting stuck in local maxima. Convenience can make us lazy and choose the wrong long-term solutions. This applies to more things than just tech ("convenience" may make us choose foods that are wrong for our health, for example).
- kazinator 7y ago
  Traditional free software developers do not use the most convenient program without caring about freedom. Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator. GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it. (I've only ever used GIMP since 1996; I have no idea about Photoshop and don't care; it's not free, won't use it.) People went through all sorts of inconveniences to use free software, like manually figuring out monitor clock timings to stick into their X configuration, building their own custom kernels and whatnot. You can't say "convenience wins" with a straight face; that's like saying free software doesn't exist.
  - 7y ago

jseliger 7y ago

An excellent point. FOSS has long been great at underlying tech, freedom, and openness, and terrible at UI/UX and ease-of-use. That's been true for a long time and still seems to be true today. The reasons for this are much-debated and well-known, yet the underlying challenge persists.

kazinator 7y ago
Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech, and those are the people who write free software for themselves and others like them. (Why would you spend months making some UI that in the end requires a minute of manual labor to do what some piece of syntax in a config file achieves in seconds, and which can be diffed to the previous version and so on.) There are good examples of UI in free software. There are also terrible examples of UI in proprietary software. A lot of the peculiar user experience in GNU/Linux is that way because it was cloned quite exactly from a proprietary system called Unix. A lot of that bad user experience is standardized with an IEEE standard called POSIX, which isn't free.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  > Rather what is considered good UI and ease of use is sub-optimal for people who understand tech The widespread love of the Mac and OS X among techies on HN says otherwise.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    True, and that includes me. My favorite thing to say about bad UI is "those designers should spend two weeks using a Mac from 1985". :)
  - mrob 7y ago
    It says nothing about whether it's optimal or not. You can't easily evaluate how good a UI is for expert users until you're an expert yourself, and once you've made that effort, will you really want to abandon all that hard-won skill to learn another system? I think many people use sub-optimal UIs because the short-term cost of learning a different one, which might not even be better, is too high.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago

> Assume they are rational beings, and get at the heart of it. Except: They aren't, so you won't get at the heart of it if you make that assumption. People simply are extremely short-sighted. People choose the "convenient" proprietary solution for the same reason that they elect the "convenient" dictator or for the same reason that they choose the "convenient" SUV ... what all of those choices (and countless others) have in common is that long-term costs are simply ignored when making the decision. It's actually just a lie that proprietary software is more convenient. What is true is that it (oftentimes) is more short-term-convenient, i.e., you will save some time/effort right now. But the pretty much universal goal of the proprietors of proprietary software, and in particular of proprietary platforms, is to use that short-term convenience (which they optimize for) to establish themselves in a position of power, which they then use in the long term to maximize the profit while inconveniencing those they have managed to gain power over in any way that promises profits. The most pernicious form of that long-term inconvenience is the "invisible inconvenience", namely the inconvenience that results from hindering innovation by hindering competition: It's inconvenience that you never notice because the more convenient alternative simply never gets developed, so you never get to experience the difference between what you do have and what you could have.

jhoechtl 7y ago

> Many Linux and FOSS geeks today use Linux only professionally As a long time FOSS and Linux user I can tell you that usability of FOSS GUI systems has repaidely degraded in comparison to professional systems (Mac OS or Windows). If half of my hardware is defunct under Linux I will not use the FOSS. It's like buying anew car and being unable to switch to fourth and fifth gear or use the built-in entertainment system. The Wayland fork hasn't contributed to this situation.

floatingatoll 7y ago

FOSS does not appear to value user accessibility as a priority. Non-IRC, non-XMPP chat systems continue to implement features that users enjoy and appreciate, while IRC/XMPP clients argue that those features are irrelevant because the ideals of IRC/XMPP should take precedence. IRC has, in the past ten years, fallen behind on: - Scrollback syncing (client-to-client) and persistence (server-to-client) - Everyday user interface (mIRC ships a UI from 1995) - Setup and configuration (I can't get SASL right on the first try and I helped upgrade an IRC network to support it) - Authenticity at a network level (not just Anope setting a umode) - Protocol resilience (netsplits should not be visible to users) - Defense against attackers (pitting the idealism of anonymity against the safety of identity) Why has FOSS allowed itself to be eclipsed by closed-source chat providers in these regards? I believe it's because the ideals of FOSS are now in direct conflict with the needs of modern users, including FOSS people themselves. For example: - Anonymity is an ideal to be held up above all others, so defending against spam attacks is impossible, because anonymous users are granted equal rights as my friends. - Accuracy is an ideal to be held up above all others, so preventing netsplits is impossible, because the clients must know when they don't have a realtime immediate connection to each other. - Maximally-capable UX is an ideal to be held up above all others, so building a less-capable UX that is more widely easier to understand is impossible, because otherwise we might not be able to view our chat at the maximum information density possible. - Local-only data is an ideal to be held up above all others, so scrollback syncing must be outright prohibited and campaigned against, because otherwise the clients would expect the server to help them exchange data that the server must never permit itself to hold. If FOSS realigns its ideals with those of modern users such as ourselves, then it could easily retake the gap covered in the past decade by closed-source software. I hope with all my heart that it does so someday, but I'm not holding my breath. Footnote: Apologies for all the whitespace but, ironically, HN doesn't support formatted text such as bulleted lists, nor does IRC. This would take up half as much vertical space on your screen on Slack :)

frobozz 7y ago
Chat (and communications in general) is a tricky field to evaluate for this sort of thing, due to Metcalfe's law and related effects. I also don't think it would be easy for the gap to be retaken (for the same reason). I use Slack, Facebook, Twitter etc. because I want to communicate with other people who use those services for communication. If I only use IRC and email, I would miss out on some of that communication. I don't know the various reasons why each of those people use them, and I agree that it is, in part because of some of the things you mention. However, it is also probably also down to marketing. Many people use XMPP via Whatsapp without knowing it, they are just using Whatsapp. The user accessibility problem is not universal to all FOSS. In my opinion, LibreOffice (MPL) is a superior office suite in terms of usability to MS Office. Audacity (GPL) has a simpler UX than many proprietary audio editing suites.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

We don't have an internet that functions as intended. IPSs conspired to prevent residential users from running servers. The result is that everything free either needs a patron to cover expenses or be monetizable.

claudiawerner 7y ago

>Assume they are rational beings, and get at the heart of it. Why? Why import the concept of homo oeconomicus into this discussion?