6 ms·

I've been an advocate for and developer of Free software for a very long time. But the UX of everything Free is just horribly bad. I've written a toy softsynt

I've been an advocate for and developer of Free software for a very long time. But the UX of everything Free is just horribly bad. I've written a toy softsynth for myself in Ruby and was looking for some MIDI editing software that I could use to quickly throw some notes in a piano roll and draw some curves for various CCs, and export to a .mid. But everything was incredibly cumbersome. Of the several I tried, only Ardour even allowed the control of arbitrary CCs, and I had to dig to find it, and it wanted to create an entire directory hierarchy before I could even draw a single note. If there was going to be a Free revolution of people donating and volunteering to overthrow the proprietary software world, it would have happened a long time ago. Free software has an insurmountable design, development, and discovery problem. If I were looking to start a community today, and actually have people join it, I'd go where the people are, and that is Discord.

antihero 5y ago
Yep, much as it has its drawbacks, Discord is where people jump in and get involved. Convenience wins.
evilsetg 5y ago
Discord, as any free propreitary online service is fundamentally unaccountable. Their user support is non existent. They disabled my account without a concrete reason given and now will not answer my requests to tell me why they disabled it. I beg any community not to use Discord for it does not respect it's users. Please do not subject other people to that.
mxmilkiib 5y ago
Linux took over the server market, and Matrix looks like it will take over the chat/VOIP market. Even if that requires top-down investment, it's still a win for FOSS. Edit; my midi sequencer recommendation would be sequencer64/seq66.
jancsika 5y ago
> Free software has an insurmountable design, development, and discovery problem. Someone in the 80s probably wrote that free software has an insurmountable tooling, compiler, and operating system problem. The surmountable hurdle is for key free software developers to learn enough about design and discovery to honor and encourage the very few people who currently show up to do that work. If they made the experts feel like rock stars I'm sure more would turn up to do work for free. I offer as evidence the number of free software devs who work on free software tooling, compilers, and operating systems as evidence of this.
- analognoise 5y ago
  I think the obvious lack of uptake of the free software for applications makes GP right.
- qaq 5y ago
  Well as things stand now they are in most cases very well compensated employees of major companies who are working on these projects as part of their job.

antihero 5y ago

Yep, much as it has its drawbacks, Discord is where people jump in and get involved. Convenience wins.

evilsetg 5y ago

Discord, as any free propreitary online service is fundamentally unaccountable. Their user support is non existent. They disabled my account without a concrete reason given and now will not answer my requests to tell me why they disabled it. I beg any community not to use Discord for it does not respect it's users. Please do not subject other people to that.

mxmilkiib 5y ago

Linux took over the server market, and Matrix looks like it will take over the chat/VOIP market. Even if that requires top-down investment, it's still a win for FOSS. Edit; my midi sequencer recommendation would be sequencer64/seq66.

jancsika 5y ago

> Free software has an insurmountable design, development, and discovery problem. Someone in the 80s probably wrote that free software has an insurmountable tooling, compiler, and operating system problem. The surmountable hurdle is for key free software developers to learn enough about design and discovery to honor and encourage the very few people who currently show up to do that work. If they made the experts feel like rock stars I'm sure more would turn up to do work for free. I offer as evidence the number of free software devs who work on free software tooling, compilers, and operating systems as evidence of this.

analognoise 5y ago
I think the obvious lack of uptake of the free software for applications makes GP right.
qaq 5y ago
Well as things stand now they are in most cases very well compensated employees of major companies who are working on these projects as part of their job.