19 ms·

Boiling frog stuff... We complained about this 20 years ago, all these moves were known back then, yet here we are. More to come - TPM required to connect to t

by bitL 6y ago

Boiling frog stuff... We complained about this 20 years ago, all these moves were known back then, yet here we are. More to come - TPM required to connect to the Internet and access news sources without any ability to store information on our own devices. Followed by rewriting historical articles to properly "sanitize" content.

api 6y ago
User experience is everything, and without a good profitable business model FOSS can't afford the massive investment of time and effort required to bring a competitive user experience. Making stuff work is only maybe 20% of the work required to build a product... sometimes less. I've been yelling about that for years and years and very few people seem to get it. Free as in freedom got conflated with free as in beer years ago, and FOSS today is not much more than "waaah gimme free stuff!" It's not a gift culture. It's a "take culture." Anyone who suggests any change to FOSS culture to remedy this problem gets shouted down. Any license that tries to remedy it gets attacked as "not OSI compliant" and restricting peoples' rights. Meanwhile commercial closed source and SaaS vendors have the resources to leave FOSS and open ecosystems in the dust in terms of features and user experience. While the license purists yell about "restrictive licenses" taking away rights, the gravity of the walled gardens becomes more and more powerful. The choice is between free and freedom.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > User experience is everything It's very important, but it's not "everything". > and without a good profitable business model FOSS can't afford the massive investment of time and effort required to bring a competitive user experience. By that logic, most FOSS should not have existed at all. > Making stuff work is only maybe 20% of the work required to build a product... sometimes less. That's often true. It's certainly true for some of the software projects I maintain. > Commercial closed source and SaaS vendors have the resources to leave FOSS and open ecosystems in the dust in terms of features and user experience That's not possible even with infinite resources, because FOSS software is sometimes great, often good, and also often the only thing available.
- p1necone 6y ago
  There's a lot of open source software that provides a fantastic user experience to developers, perhaps the solution is somehow getting some users to work on your open source product when developers aren't your intended users.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    Even as a developer the things I want just don't work reliably: 1. Bluetooth; Audio especially, but all BT is flaky. 2. Low Latency audio; I have tried Jack on numerous machines and always find myself staring at high latency buffers because the kernel audio driver can't perform any better, and then there's how often it just ... goes silent without any trace in the logs. 3. Suspend and battery usage are, in general, still a decade behind the competition.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Those first two don't work very well on my proprietary systems either. And, come to think of it, hibernation's been broken on my Windows install too lately.
    - Reelin 6y ago
      Driver issues are generally down (AFAIK) to proprietary hardware being shrouded in secrecy. Being forced to reverse engineer a particular component because the manufacturer won't share the spec sheet is a significant drain on the already comparatively limited resources of FOSS software development.
    - yaantc 6y ago
      > 3. Suspend and battery usage are, in general, still a decade behind the competition. For suspend there's been some regressions a few years back, but I use it all the time now on both Dell Latitude and Thinkpad X without any issue. Battery usage is way better with Linux than with Windows, at least on the Latitude where I can easily compare with my Windows 10 using colleagues. It's not even close, and I also avoid the constant fan noise ;) Now there's one thing to keep in mind: if you don't use a pre-installed Linux distro (which I don't, I use Debian stable) then you are the system integrator ;) No way around this. But on well supported models like the Latitude and Thinkpad at least this integration is very easy: for me I just install the "tlp" (The Laptop Project) package, and because I only use SSD I aggressively idle the disk. This configuration I did years ago and simply reuse it. Done.
- mcbits 6y ago
  People complaining the loudest about "not OSI compliant" etc. are not complaining about the software being non-FOSS. They're complaining about non-FOSS software masquerading as/lying about being FOSS. If the solution to making FOSS more competitive with non-FOSS is to make FOSS non-FOSS, well, that's not much of a solution.
- thayne 6y ago
  User experience is definitely not everything. Plenty of successful "enterprise" software products have terrible user experiences.
beauzero 6y ago
It's Fahrenheit 451 without actually having to burn the books. Commerce will turn them into toilet paper and soon there are no original works. Just digital content that can be changed to meet the narrative at the moment. Interesting times.
anthk 6y ago
TCPA again.

by bitL 6y ago

api 6y ago

User experience is everything, and without a good profitable business model FOSS can't afford the massive investment of time and effort required to bring a competitive user experience. Making stuff work is only maybe 20% of the work required to build a product... sometimes less. I've been yelling about that for years and years and very few people seem to get it. Free as in freedom got conflated with free as in beer years ago, and FOSS today is not much more than "waaah gimme free stuff!" It's not a gift culture. It's a "take culture." Anyone who suggests any change to FOSS culture to remedy this problem gets shouted down. Any license that tries to remedy it gets attacked as "not OSI compliant" and restricting peoples' rights. Meanwhile commercial closed source and SaaS vendors have the resources to leave FOSS and open ecosystems in the dust in terms of features and user experience. While the license purists yell about "restrictive licenses" taking away rights, the gravity of the walled gardens becomes more and more powerful. The choice is between free and freedom.

einpoklum 6y ago
> User experience is everything It's very important, but it's not "everything". > and without a good profitable business model FOSS can't afford the massive investment of time and effort required to bring a competitive user experience. By that logic, most FOSS should not have existed at all. > Making stuff work is only maybe 20% of the work required to build a product... sometimes less. That's often true. It's certainly true for some of the software projects I maintain. > Commercial closed source and SaaS vendors have the resources to leave FOSS and open ecosystems in the dust in terms of features and user experience That's not possible even with infinite resources, because FOSS software is sometimes great, often good, and also often the only thing available.
p1necone 6y ago
There's a lot of open source software that provides a fantastic user experience to developers, perhaps the solution is somehow getting some users to work on your open source product when developers aren't your intended users.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Even as a developer the things I want just don't work reliably: 1. Bluetooth; Audio especially, but all BT is flaky. 2. Low Latency audio; I have tried Jack on numerous machines and always find myself staring at high latency buffers because the kernel audio driver can't perform any better, and then there's how often it just ... goes silent without any trace in the logs. 3. Suspend and battery usage are, in general, still a decade behind the competition.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Those first two don't work very well on my proprietary systems either. And, come to think of it, hibernation's been broken on my Windows install too lately.
  - Reelin 6y ago
    Driver issues are generally down (AFAIK) to proprietary hardware being shrouded in secrecy. Being forced to reverse engineer a particular component because the manufacturer won't share the spec sheet is a significant drain on the already comparatively limited resources of FOSS software development.
  - yaantc 6y ago
    > 3. Suspend and battery usage are, in general, still a decade behind the competition. For suspend there's been some regressions a few years back, but I use it all the time now on both Dell Latitude and Thinkpad X without any issue. Battery usage is way better with Linux than with Windows, at least on the Latitude where I can easily compare with my Windows 10 using colleagues. It's not even close, and I also avoid the constant fan noise ;) Now there's one thing to keep in mind: if you don't use a pre-installed Linux distro (which I don't, I use Debian stable) then you are the system integrator ;) No way around this. But on well supported models like the Latitude and Thinkpad at least this integration is very easy: for me I just install the "tlp" (The Laptop Project) package, and because I only use SSD I aggressively idle the disk. This configuration I did years ago and simply reuse it. Done.
mcbits 6y ago
People complaining the loudest about "not OSI compliant" etc. are not complaining about the software being non-FOSS. They're complaining about non-FOSS software masquerading as/lying about being FOSS. If the solution to making FOSS more competitive with non-FOSS is to make FOSS non-FOSS, well, that's not much of a solution.
thayne 6y ago
User experience is definitely not everything. Plenty of successful "enterprise" software products have terrible user experiences.

beauzero 6y ago

It's Fahrenheit 451 without actually having to burn the books. Commerce will turn them into toilet paper and soon there are no original works. Just digital content that can be changed to meet the narrative at the moment. Interesting times.

anthk 6y ago

TCPA again.