“Well, some people do want to work on such problems for free, even if not everyone does.“ It’s not whether anyone does, it’s whether enough people do. In FOSS

“Well, some people do want to work on such problems for free, even if not everyone does.“ It’s not whether anyone does, it’s whether enough people do. In FOSS I don’t see evidence of any large project getting significant usability work for free. Firefox, likely the most popular user-facing FOSS application, it’s essentially adware via a nonprofit. Blender’s foundation has significant support from corporations. There are people working on those problems for FOSS but they’re likely paid, and that’s just not feasible for most FOSS. Also, freeness in our society can have unintended consequences— the way news organizations are forced to operate because they can’t easily be directly compensated for their work (because people expect it to be free) is a huge problem. I can’t imagine software being any different in today’s context. Beyond that, most FOSS is entirely developer-managed and project decisions reflect that bias. To this day, many folks think the only problem with git’s interface is its users unwillingness to read the documentation. Literally zero people who aren’t software developers— including the copywriters, project managers, designers, support people, etc. who end up also having to use it— would agree. There are certainly usability advantages with many hardware applications over software replacements but being able to use generic logic hardware to control things is a pretty huge advantage. Most folks don’t realize how resource-intensive manufacturing is. I haven’t run the numbers, but I’ll bet a few extra PCBs would equal a whole lot of software bloat. Hardware is also vastly less flexible, and as a result would probably be significantly less efficient to create. I haven’t run any numbers though. I often advocate for drastically scaling back copyrights— especially in media and software. Their current state is absurd. Forgive my hyperbole to emphasize the dichotomy: Abolishing software patents, however, seems like fighting America’s imperialist behaviors by demanding an immediate disarmament of the country, entirely. I’d love that if our world was in a state that could facilitate that without immediately being overtaken by China… that wouldn’t be better for anybody.