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Comment by hyperion2010 | Hacker News Reader

hyperion2010

For better or for worse, this is nothing new. It is a symptom of the fact that the FSF and other FOSS organizations have displayed a fantastic failure of technical leadership for over 3 decades. The political leadership has not been bad, but if you go back and dig through the history of open source you will see that there have been multiple repeated failures by the supposed thought leaders to provide the equivalent level of technical excellence that is required to compete.

Making the lives of developers of free software easier has rarely if ever been on the list of priorities for many of the core projects.

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> It is a symptom of the fact that the FSF and other FOSS organizations have displayed a fantastic failure of technical leadership for over 3 decades.

I agree that many FSF/GNU projects have made horrible technical choices, but I don’t think that’s really the root cause here. The reality is that good software requires an enormous amount of skilled labor to create and maintain, and the FSF and other OSS orgs can only muster a small fraction of the engineering hours that a mid-sized for-profit software company could.

In addition, good user-facing software requires more than just good engineering - you need good UX, product direction, etc. Sometimes the creator or maintainer of an OSS program will have the good fortune to be reasonably good at all of these, but it’s very rare, and there aren’t nearly as many UX designers or product managers looking to contribute to open source as there are developers. Even if someone did want to help in this role, the developers on most projects would probably ignore them.

>Even if someone did want to help in this role, the developers on most projects would probably ignore them.

This is the lion's share of the problem, I suspect. OSS projects are driven by the people who write the code, and they don't take orders, and they don't massively value making things easy to use - or even necessarily have much connection with what that means. Current computing is such a pain in the ass that we've basically selected for inhuman levels of persistence and patience, and placed a large cultural value on those traits to boot. "Read the docs", we say. "Use the source", we say.

We don't have any idea how many human factors experts are out there, willing to help, because there's no process for them to contribute beyond "submit a pull request" - and even then, a purely UI tweak will meet with huge resistance. The UI expert is going to have to be a diplomat as well.

Stallman and by extension the FSF are opposed to user experiences. He links to the following article on his website:

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/

And of course, no closed software has _ever_ had a poor UI/UX.

It has a money in the bank at the end of the month, regardless of the UI/UX.

It might? It might also not have money in the bank? Is that relevant?

Bad UX is subjective. Money doesn't change that.

Bad UX (for some definition of bad) may be subjective, but that doesn't mean money won't affect it.

Suppose we want to optimize user productivity. For any given UX, some users will feel they're more productive with it, and some less. Finding a UX that maximizes the number of users who feel productive is going to help attract users to the product, and money can buy the design expertise needed to find that UX.

It might be the case that users only feel more productive with a given UX and aren't actually more productive with it. Even then, if a majority of potential users think that the UX is making it easier to accomplish their goals, a project will have an easier time attracting users.

It changes where most people are willing to spend their skills.

I don't think anyone claimed that. Do you disagree that OSS tends to have a worse UI than commercially developed software? If not, what's your point?

It's particularly interesting, because the rise of GNU is because it was an overall better set of tools than what Unix vendors shipped (HP-UX, IBM AIX, Sun OS, SGi Irix...).

The age of web changed all of that. Instead of being stuck on your computer with whatever tools you could obtain for it, you could now access centrally-maintained, quality webservices.

The FSF realized the freedom risk that centrally-maintained services posed, and created stuff like the AGPL to address it, but there just isn't as much leverage for that to take off like the GPL did.

Stallman's (and the FSF's) view on services is that it's like paying a plumber. The plumber isn't violating any of your freedoms by using non-free tools in their repair work, but it is unfortunate. This is a pragmatic view, because Stallman needed to grapple with continuing riding public transportation, even as they relied on non-free software, so an arbitrary line was drawn in the sand, one that barely made sense in the 80s and only continued to become more bizarre as computers became more and more networked.

This line has very bizarre consequences: FSF-supported hardware prefers closed-source firmware to be fused into ROM rather than upgradeble, the theory being that manufacturers shouldn't have more freedoms than the user. My favorite story was a laptop recommended by the FSF went from being "free" to "non-free" because an engineer found an undocumented protocol to upload new firmware to memory that the FSF thought was fused shut. These are the weird results that emerge when extrapolating extreme fundamentalist social policies far beyond their breaking point.

The FSF and Stallman do not care about the AGPL that much, they are far more worried about non-free software running on your own machine, like non-free JavaScript. Otherwise, Stallman couldn't ethically ride the T.

FWIW Stallman's stance was always that freedom is more important than technical excellence and that he'd rather use and promote a technically inferior product that respected users' freedoms than one that was technically superior but came with shackles.

Which is one of the reason's Stallman's ideas are fundamentally flawed as if there's a better product available even if it's only free as in beer, people will use it over the worse one, from the end user's perspective.

In the worldview of Stallman, your argument is analogous to saying that advocating for democracy is flawed because if an authoritarian regime or slave society provides a better product, people will choose it over worse democratic ones.

To Stallman, your counter-argument is a non-sequitur. His goal is maximizing user freedom. UX may be one dimension of user freedom, but at best it's secondary to certain prerequisite freedoms, such as the freedom to modify code so you can independently improve it, perhaps by improving UX for yourself and your community.

Many people sympathetic to Stallman, but more utilitarian, might argue that in the long term, user freedom is necessary for achieving optimal utility (e.g. UX, etc). And getting there might require short-term sacrifices in superficial aspects like UX.

It's really simple. If you want me to use your software, it needs to not be like brushing my teeth with a Dremel. I have things to get done, and while the Open Source movement doesn't owe anyone anything, I'm going to pick the product that isn't going to halt my work to try to figure out what broke again.

With as many open and closed options that exist out there, competition is a thing and Open Source as a whole needs to compete on more than just being "the freedom option"

Stallman's valid points are entirely lost in the ocean-full of software like GNU Image Manipulation Tool that incite frustration from users.

> In the worldview of Stallman, your argument is analogous to saying that advocating for democracy is flawed because if an authoritarian regime or slave society provides a better product, people will choose it over worse democratic ones.

Except that's exactly what human behavior does.

Fundamentalists take hardline stances to problems. To Stallman, one of the most unethical, immoral things one can do is to willingly run a computer program that they do not have permissions to modify.

Very few people in the world, even most FOSS contributors and developers, share that belief that strongly. They might feel like FOSS programs give them certain advantages and rights, but morals? Stallman has mentioned that he would rather go homeless than run proprietary software. That level of devotion is exceedingly rare.

To approach someone, even a Linux user, and tell them that they need to give up their convenience for free software because what they are doing is immoral, that's a very hard sell. This is one reason GNU has mostly produced free software clones of better, commercial software, where practical concerns take a backseat to GPL.

Can you give some examples of the fantastic failures?

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