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You want to build a chair. Home depot sells you a hammer which you can use to build chairs. Someone runs up to you in the car park and calls you and tells you t

You want to build a chair. Home depot sells you a hammer which you can use to build chairs. Someone runs up to you in the car park and calls you and tells you that you are using toy tools and you have no real awareness of the world, and if only you give up a couple of weekends on some blacksmithing and woodworking you can make your own tools and build anything, what do you think? You say you want to build a chair and this hammer is ready-made and convenient, and they tell you that you only think buying hammers is the natural state of things because you were told that. You try to walk away. They get in front of you and say that you don't understand the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of tools! You step to the side and push past, they call after you that you are in prison and don't even know it! You get home and make a chair. It's a nice chair. You sit in it while telling the story about the crazy person you met earlier. > "Anyone, ANYONE, who agrees that you're somehow wrong when you use it to build a table is a shill, a sucker, or an idiot. Full stop." You buy arsenic, you can't put it in people's food. You buy a camera, you can't use it to sneakily record people using the toilet even in your own home. You buy a recorder, you can't use it to quietly record phonecalls in many states. You rent a film to watch at home, you can't show it to a large audience for profit. You buy a radio transmitter, you can't modify it to be more powerful or use different frequencies. You can't decorate your car to look like a police car, put a midnight klaxon on your house or an unsightly chimney overshadowing the neighbourhood. You can't lease a car and disassemble it to find out how it works. There are restrictions on all kinds of things in everyday life for all kinds of reasons. And you don't get a free pass to do any of these things with a computer just because you identify as a computer geek. The rhetoric that people who are agreeable or disinterested, must be "shill, sucker, idiot, full stop" is plainly incorrect and embarassingly simplistic, and just pointless insults. As you can see from the large number of people who use macOS to develop for Linux servers because it's got a nice GUI - people who definitely know about Linux, aren't shilling for anything. You calling them suckers and idiots is irrelevent when they get a better experience and trade away nothing which interests them. That's not stupid, that's a reasonable trade.

deleted 4y ago
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jrm4 4y ago
Ah. This is that thing called "tone-policing." I frankly have no idea if you believe the same fundamentals that I do; they generally fall under the ideas of "free software," and they are frequently abused by the large companies and I feel it is important to call such bad behavior out as what it is; especially when perhaps professionals may have been lulled into going along with it. I'm fairly certain the "politeness" or whatever it is you're calling for here works against my goals here. I could be wrong about that, but either way I don't think what you're railing against is as near as important as the bigger idea I presented initially.
- krageon 4y ago
  After I wrote three lengthy paragraphs explaining to them how the espoused philosophy makes no sense, I realised I could not conceive of a reality where these arguments were made in good faith. Perhaps it is better to just not engage with it.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  It isn't tone policing to call out posts which are low-effort insults to millions of people, and not coherent arguments for or against anything. There are tons of reasons people make decisions about software - it's what they learned before and can setup quickest, it's the standard in their industry, it's what their boss demanded, it's used by a customer or supplier and they need to be compatible, it's approved by a third party organisation or certification program, it's the only one a vendor will support, or they've considered software freedom and come to different conclusions than you and don't value it at all. Why should a Disney animator care whether they have the source to PhotoShop? Why should a manufacturing company CEO care that their data in an Oracle database file can't be read by third party tools? Why should an ISP care that they are paying for PowerDNS instead of using BIND9? Why should an accountant care that TurboTax can't be extended by a consultant they hire? Why should a congressperson care that Adobe licensing isn't GPL? Much easier not to discuss and instead say people "perhaps may have been lulled into going along with it". Which is empty low-effort "I'm smarter, more awake, less deceivable" tribal posturing and nothing else, and then when called out on it, try and sidestep into complaining about tone-policing instead.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jrm4 4y ago

Ah. This is that thing called "tone-policing." I frankly have no idea if you believe the same fundamentals that I do; they generally fall under the ideas of "free software," and they are frequently abused by the large companies and I feel it is important to call such bad behavior out as what it is; especially when perhaps professionals may have been lulled into going along with it. I'm fairly certain the "politeness" or whatever it is you're calling for here works against my goals here. I could be wrong about that, but either way I don't think what you're railing against is as near as important as the bigger idea I presented initially.

krageon 4y ago
After I wrote three lengthy paragraphs explaining to them how the espoused philosophy makes no sense, I realised I could not conceive of a reality where these arguments were made in good faith. Perhaps it is better to just not engage with it.
jodrellblank 4y ago
It isn't tone policing to call out posts which are low-effort insults to millions of people, and not coherent arguments for or against anything. There are tons of reasons people make decisions about software - it's what they learned before and can setup quickest, it's the standard in their industry, it's what their boss demanded, it's used by a customer or supplier and they need to be compatible, it's approved by a third party organisation or certification program, it's the only one a vendor will support, or they've considered software freedom and come to different conclusions than you and don't value it at all. Why should a Disney animator care whether they have the source to PhotoShop? Why should a manufacturing company CEO care that their data in an Oracle database file can't be read by third party tools? Why should an ISP care that they are paying for PowerDNS instead of using BIND9? Why should an accountant care that TurboTax can't be extended by a consultant they hire? Why should a congressperson care that Adobe licensing isn't GPL? Much easier not to discuss and instead say people "perhaps may have been lulled into going along with it". Which is empty low-effort "I'm smarter, more awake, less deceivable" tribal posturing and nothing else, and then when called out on it, try and sidestep into complaining about tone-policing instead.