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That's a terrible analogy for the differences between Photoshop and Gimp. For one thing Photoshop is a transferrable skill. Gimp will get you laughed out the d

That's a terrible analogy for the differences between Photoshop and Gimp. For one thing Photoshop is a transferrable skill. Gimp will get you laughed out the door of most photo studios and design agencies. For another - too many FOSS people just do not understand that tinkering with tools is not the point for most users. If you like tinkering with tools, go tinker with tools. Most people have work to do, and tinkering with tools is not something they want to be distracted by. Photoshop is far from being my favourite product, and Adobe are very far from being my favourite company. In fact I - and millions of other users - would be delighted if we could save $$$$ a year with a free alternative. Which applies in the general case. If FOSS was a realistic and workable alternative, it would storm the market and most people would be using it. But it isn't. Most FOSS applications are aimed at self-selecting technical users, and there's very limited interest in making tools for non-technical users. In fact IMO FOSS culture lacks the mindset and skills - and very possibly the empathy - to understand what general users want from their tools. It's been a success for developers who want to make technical tools for other developers. And also for infrastructure. Not to take anything from that, because that's both significant and true. But for popular non-expert applications? Simply - no.

KronisLV 4y ago
> For one thing Photoshop is a transferable skill. Gimp will get you laughed out the door of most photo studios and design agencies. This is pretty much a self-perpetuating cycle and what happens when you have something close to a monopoly. Everyone uses Photoshop, almost nobody uses GIMP. Everyone uses Chrome, almost nobody uses Firefox. Everyone uses Windows, almost nobody uses Linux and so on... Thankfully, in the server space, *nix reigns supreme and FOSS has a larger foothold, though thanks to the above, the "year of the Linux desktop" may as well never come. > Most FOSS applications are aimed at self-selecting technical users, and there's very limited interest in making tools for non-technical users. In fact IMO FOSS culture lacks the mindset and skills - and very possibly the empathy - to understand what general users want from their tools. I'd say that it's also a matter of prioritizing what's necessary to get things done and simply not having the resources for the rest: UX, marketing, branding, integrations and so on.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  >This is pretty much a self-perpetuating cycle and what happens when you have something close to a monopoly. That's simply not true. While having high market share does give you a short-term advantage, if a better alternative exists you'll bleed market share over time. Look at what happened to Netscape, then Internet Explorer, then Firefox. It'll happen to Chromium eventually too. Open-source alternatives to popular desktop software packages have existed for decades, and the reason they haven't snatched market share away from the main packages is because they don't work well.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > That's simply not true. While having high market share does give you a short-term advantage, if a better alternative exists you'll bleed market share over time. Look at what happened to Netscape, then Internet Explorer, then Firefox. It'll happen to Chromium eventually too. The time frames at play shouldn't be forgotten about here, nor should the magnitude of the effect. Most developers universally hated IE from IE 6 (2001) to IE 11, which might still be supported until 2030: > Microsoft is committed to support Internet Explorer that way to 2030 at least, with one year's notice before it is discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_11 And yet, it still had to be supported and for some systems still needs to be. For whatever stupid reason, many were locked into using it and had little choice. Sure, eventually it could be tossed aside by most sane enterprises, but if developers had been given proper reign over what to choose to use, then it would have been ditched a few years after the release of IE 6 (Firefox came out around 2002). The average Joe/Jane doesn't really care about the browsers, though. They might not even recognize what a browser really is, merely know that they can use that one icon to access the Internet. Thus, the choice is made for them. Similarly, most laptops and desktop computers come with Windows preinstalled due to manufacturer deals, much like how most Android variations come with adware and other garbage. Nobody wants it, but nobody (at a certain price point), has any alternatives. If you don't know that there's a choice to make, someone else will make it for you. And i'd posit that there isn't as much of a difference between being technologically illiterate in Windows and being technologically illiterate in *nix. > Open-source alternatives to popular desktop software packages have existed for decades, and the reason they haven't snatched market share away from the main packages is because they don't work well. This is fair, though, especially because most FOSS software is basically developed below the poverty line: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html Nobody's going to have good UX or fancy onboarding if they can barely find enough resources to keep the project going and fix all of the bugs, as well as handle the technological churn of keeping dependencies up to date etc. Outside of the ravings of FOSS enthusiasts and niche circumstances (e.g. servers), open source software will generally find it hard to compete with commercial offerings, most of the time, especially when it comes to software for the common folk.
thewebcount 4y ago
> and very possibly the empathy Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program. I can’t imagine forcing students to care about .rc files and whatever’s in /etc. Not to mention the differences between whatever shell is installed by default and the various other shells that are also scripting languages, etc. I’m a veteran programmer in my 50s and this shit is too much for me to care about. I have work to do. Editing text files in vim or Emacs is utterly stupid for most users. It’s not like TextEdit or Notepad don’t do most of what students need without a bunch of cryptic crap involved, or that IDEs wouldn’t allow students to delve into programming much more easily. I just don’t get the cult of Unix. Yes, it’s powerful for a large class of things that programmers like to do. But it’s a terrible OS for normal users. And that won’t change until the people making it and making tools for it grow up and think of someone other than themselves when they write programs.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > > and very possibly the empathy > Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program. It's more likely that designing effective UX is just extremely difficult. I'm guessing it's so difficult that neither the user nor the FOSS developer even know how to define the problem in a lot of cases. E.g., go back and try to find a pre-Google era user asking for streamlined search capability in some Linux application mailing list. Something like, "I just want to type in the thing I'm looking for and find the thing I wanted." IIRC most university library search tools before Google had a few dozen fields to specify the type of data you wanted to search for, and a crappy "keywords" field that often didn't return the desired record. So a student would search by first not finding what they were after, then calling over a librarian to help them choose the correct fields and input strings. I'll rankly speculate that any such discussion on a pre-Google FOSS application user list would have consisted of a developer arguing that such an approach cannot work by providing a set of canned edge-cases with unresolvable ambiguities. And this response would have convinced the user who likely had no idea how the whole search algo works in the first place, or what the potential solutions could look like. Then Google came along. (Well, the Google that exist before the current one which seems to be purposely inserting non-relevant results that a recommendation algo has determined still have a decent chance of engaging the user.) And the FOSS mailing list response tacitly shifted from, "That's probably not a well-formed feature," to, "Patches accepted." I'm not sure what the current response would be, but I doubt it generates a lot of enthusiasm for improving the UX. Hell, even in the well-formed feature requests the implementation details are probably a major pain in the ass. For funsies-- go download the old Gimp that consisted entirely of toplevel windows, and try to figure out the most workable way of converting it a single-window app with subwindows. That's like some kind of demented detention punishment for FOSS devs who break the CoC. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
digisign 4y ago
With this logic we'd demand students learn the best proprietary calculator-hardware instead of arithmetic. No, this is not the point of school.
- scarface74 4y ago
  You mean like the HP Graphing calculators that have been the standard in schools for decades?
  - digisign 4y ago
    TI in these parts, pardner.
_carbyau_ 4y ago
I'd support your comments in the general sense as you seem to intend. This is the dichotomy of Open Source. The tool tinkerers can build fantastic things - but only what they want because it is their free time and effort. If it happens to align with the market, then great, if not, too bad. My personal favourite exception is Blender. As a long running project it seemed to get more and more aligned with the market until the industry saw it was "close enough" to start supporting it. If we could replicate this for other tools it'd be nice.

KronisLV 4y ago

> For one thing Photoshop is a transferable skill. Gimp will get you laughed out the door of most photo studios and design agencies. This is pretty much a self-perpetuating cycle and what happens when you have something close to a monopoly. Everyone uses Photoshop, almost nobody uses GIMP. Everyone uses Chrome, almost nobody uses Firefox. Everyone uses Windows, almost nobody uses Linux and so on... Thankfully, in the server space, *nix reigns supreme and FOSS has a larger foothold, though thanks to the above, the "year of the Linux desktop" may as well never come. > Most FOSS applications are aimed at self-selecting technical users, and there's very limited interest in making tools for non-technical users. In fact IMO FOSS culture lacks the mindset and skills - and very possibly the empathy - to understand what general users want from their tools. I'd say that it's also a matter of prioritizing what's necessary to get things done and simply not having the resources for the rest: UX, marketing, branding, integrations and so on.

AussieWog93 4y ago
>This is pretty much a self-perpetuating cycle and what happens when you have something close to a monopoly. That's simply not true. While having high market share does give you a short-term advantage, if a better alternative exists you'll bleed market share over time. Look at what happened to Netscape, then Internet Explorer, then Firefox. It'll happen to Chromium eventually too. Open-source alternatives to popular desktop software packages have existed for decades, and the reason they haven't snatched market share away from the main packages is because they don't work well.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > That's simply not true. While having high market share does give you a short-term advantage, if a better alternative exists you'll bleed market share over time. Look at what happened to Netscape, then Internet Explorer, then Firefox. It'll happen to Chromium eventually too. The time frames at play shouldn't be forgotten about here, nor should the magnitude of the effect. Most developers universally hated IE from IE 6 (2001) to IE 11, which might still be supported until 2030: > Microsoft is committed to support Internet Explorer that way to 2030 at least, with one year's notice before it is discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_11 And yet, it still had to be supported and for some systems still needs to be. For whatever stupid reason, many were locked into using it and had little choice. Sure, eventually it could be tossed aside by most sane enterprises, but if developers had been given proper reign over what to choose to use, then it would have been ditched a few years after the release of IE 6 (Firefox came out around 2002). The average Joe/Jane doesn't really care about the browsers, though. They might not even recognize what a browser really is, merely know that they can use that one icon to access the Internet. Thus, the choice is made for them. Similarly, most laptops and desktop computers come with Windows preinstalled due to manufacturer deals, much like how most Android variations come with adware and other garbage. Nobody wants it, but nobody (at a certain price point), has any alternatives. If you don't know that there's a choice to make, someone else will make it for you. And i'd posit that there isn't as much of a difference between being technologically illiterate in Windows and being technologically illiterate in *nix. > Open-source alternatives to popular desktop software packages have existed for decades, and the reason they haven't snatched market share away from the main packages is because they don't work well. This is fair, though, especially because most FOSS software is basically developed below the poverty line: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html Nobody's going to have good UX or fancy onboarding if they can barely find enough resources to keep the project going and fix all of the bugs, as well as handle the technological churn of keeping dependencies up to date etc. Outside of the ravings of FOSS enthusiasts and niche circumstances (e.g. servers), open source software will generally find it hard to compete with commercial offerings, most of the time, especially when it comes to software for the common folk.

thewebcount 4y ago

> and very possibly the empathy Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program. I can’t imagine forcing students to care about .rc files and whatever’s in /etc. Not to mention the differences between whatever shell is installed by default and the various other shells that are also scripting languages, etc. I’m a veteran programmer in my 50s and this shit is too much for me to care about. I have work to do. Editing text files in vim or Emacs is utterly stupid for most users. It’s not like TextEdit or Notepad don’t do most of what students need without a bunch of cryptic crap involved, or that IDEs wouldn’t allow students to delve into programming much more easily. I just don’t get the cult of Unix. Yes, it’s powerful for a large class of things that programmers like to do. But it’s a terrible OS for normal users. And that won’t change until the people making it and making tools for it grow up and think of someone other than themselves when they write programs.

jancsika 4y ago
> > and very possibly the empathy > Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program. It's more likely that designing effective UX is just extremely difficult. I'm guessing it's so difficult that neither the user nor the FOSS developer even know how to define the problem in a lot of cases. E.g., go back and try to find a pre-Google era user asking for streamlined search capability in some Linux application mailing list. Something like, "I just want to type in the thing I'm looking for and find the thing I wanted." IIRC most university library search tools before Google had a few dozen fields to specify the type of data you wanted to search for, and a crappy "keywords" field that often didn't return the desired record. So a student would search by first not finding what they were after, then calling over a librarian to help them choose the correct fields and input strings. I'll rankly speculate that any such discussion on a pre-Google FOSS application user list would have consisted of a developer arguing that such an approach cannot work by providing a set of canned edge-cases with unresolvable ambiguities. And this response would have convinced the user who likely had no idea how the whole search algo works in the first place, or what the potential solutions could look like. Then Google came along. (Well, the Google that exist before the current one which seems to be purposely inserting non-relevant results that a recommendation algo has determined still have a decent chance of engaging the user.) And the FOSS mailing list response tacitly shifted from, "That's probably not a well-formed feature," to, "Patches accepted." I'm not sure what the current response would be, but I doubt it generates a lot of enthusiasm for improving the UX. Hell, even in the well-formed feature requests the implementation details are probably a major pain in the ass. For funsies-- go download the old Gimp that consisted entirely of toplevel windows, and try to figure out the most workable way of converting it a single-window app with subwindows. That's like some kind of demented detention punishment for FOSS devs who break the CoC. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

digisign 4y ago

With this logic we'd demand students learn the best proprietary calculator-hardware instead of arithmetic. No, this is not the point of school.

scarface74 4y ago
You mean like the HP Graphing calculators that have been the standard in schools for decades?
- digisign 4y ago
  TI in these parts, pardner.

_carbyau_ 4y ago

I'd support your comments in the general sense as you seem to intend. This is the dichotomy of Open Source. The tool tinkerers can build fantastic things - but only what they want because it is their free time and effort. If it happens to align with the market, then great, if not, too bad. My personal favourite exception is Blender. As a long running project it seemed to get more and more aligned with the market until the industry saw it was "close enough" to start supporting it. If we could replicate this for other tools it'd be nice.