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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

As much as I’d love free software to be popular for being free, that’s never been the case and is increasingly unlikely to ever become the case.

Free software needs to learn to compete on features if it’s going to have the mainstream adoption necessary to survive.

This worked in engineering tools, Nginx and Apache are the most popular web servers in their category, Postgres and MySQL have enormous support, and so on.

I wonder why these are really so different? Most devs don’t care that much about the freedom I don’t think. Maybe there’s something the free software movement could learn from what engineering products are doing and apply it to consumer products?

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I think part of it at least is that the engineering tools have, on average, a more technically sophisticated user base and those tools mostly involve working at the command line or through an IDE like VS Code or the like. I think a lot of where free software falls down is on the GUI, which is less of an issue with engineering tools.

I agree. GUIs are hard!

On the other hand, it seems like Open Source has a lack of designers that are willing to contribute. For example, in Tantacrul's critique of MuseScore [0], there's issues highlighted that seem obvious in retrospect, but in Open Source projects, unless there's someone who drives the user experience, it's easy to miss all these small things that add up to signal (whether rightly or wrongly is besides the point) a lack of polish.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A

That is squarely where the problem lies. There are good open source developers out there as evidenced by the great Github projects. There are also good designers out there such as those that maintain Dribbble.com profiles. What keeps them from collaborating to produce top notch projects?

Thanks for sharing Tantacrul video. He's quite an entertaining bloke!

Designers are hard to collaborate with, from my personal experiences.

In particular, software freedom is more important on average to technical users probably because they see the more of the direct effects of having control over software.

Devs and engineers are good at learning and using complicated tools to do complicated things. The general public is less willing to put in a lot of work or research alternative software that would be good enough.

They're different because the last ten percent of use cases are not encountered by the people who have the skills to edit the software.

Very good point. Thank you.

Does that mean that something like LibreOffice should have more focus on scripting?

AppleScript got a relatively high amount of use in its day from “non-developers”, and I think Excel has quite a lot of scripting done in it.

Maybe by being really great at scripting they could compete better. Office scripting is quite tricky to do, Google Apps Script isn’t wonderful, and iWork.

I doubt there's anything engineering products do better. More likely, the reason is that there's a lot of competition in engineering tools, because engineers love to scratch their own itch. Another reason is that if you build a product for engineers, many of your users will be able to contribute.

> As much as I’d love free software to be popular for being free, that’s never been the case and is increasingly unlikely to ever become the case.

Why don't you see that happening (free software being popular for being free)?

Because it’s hard to explain what “free” means. Licencing isn’t something that most people are aware, so explaining why some software is better than others on that basis isn’t easy. This has been an issue since the 80s at least, and hasn’t worked yet. Arguably more people are more aware of computing now, but they’re also doing almost all of it within closed ecosystems.

I think the only way we’ll get people to really care about free software is to build functionality that really only works if the software is free. For example: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2006/10/29/the-view-source-...

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