[kazinator]

> Why have users chosen those environments?

Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought.

But in this case, those users are not just any old end users; the are actually supposed to be FOSS developers, so there is a heavy irony there.

I think what is doing on is that large numbers of people are now "reluctant" FOSS developers. They do FOSS because someone told them to. They got a job somewhere and the job involves writing code that gets upstreamed somewhere and is redistributable. Well, they don't give a damn about that, it's just a job, no different from working on proprietary software. Or they work on some proprietary stuff, but it interacts with and depends on some FOSS pieces so they get in there and make changes out of necessity, and those changes are freely licensed only because they are derived from a work which requires that due to copyright doctrines about derived works.

It's partly a generational thing. Notice how Doc Searls looks about fifty-something. He remembers a grassroots free software movement which was about actually about displacing proprietary software and liberating the user, and not about about providing reliable commodity middleware for locked-down devices and cloud services.

If you were born after 1990, you don't know a world in which Linux and other FOSS wasn't used for making locked-down tech, and proprietary web sites that lock in millions of people and step on their privacy. So of course it's hard to understand someone like Doc Searls.

The free software ideology originated in a world in which you still installed applications locally and ran them on local data, on a machine where you were allowed to stick in a floppy disc with any piece of machine language in its boot sector that could easily take over the machine. The machine that was understood to be owned by you once you paid for it.

[jakelazaroff]

> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought.

Isn't this kind of the point, though? To compete with proprietary software, free software needs to actually be competitive. "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it.

[kibwen]

> "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it.

Except that it has to cut it in order for a free software movement to exist, because otherwise free software is starved by a chicken-and-egg problem where developers don't use free software because it's inferior, and free software never improves because developers don't use it. In other words, being willing to use technically inferior software solely because of the superior freedoms it grants is the way to make the engine of free software run. GCC was not the best C compiler in the world when Linux started using it.

[groby_b]

That argument is not holding any water.

First, free software doesn't improve "because developers use it". It improves because developers work on it. Blaming the users for that problem is not helping at all, except with a vague sense of moral superiority.

Second, people use tools (e.g. software) to achieve things. "Making the engine of free software run" is not on that list of things for the vast majority of people, so maybe we should try giving them reasons that actually matter to them.

Third, the reason that GCC was used for Linux was that it was the only one that was widely available, free, and had a 386 backend that produced useful code. Nobody involved gave a bit about "engines of free software" and "superior freedom", it was the only tool to get the job done.

It was certainly not technically inferior at the time.

Fourth, a large part of the reason for commercial software usage is the incredibly sanctimonious community around OSS.

If I can buy a piece of software that does exactly what I need, in a pleasant way, for a small amount of money, potentially even with support that cares about me? Why ON EARTH would I sink tons of time into a craptastic piece of software with horrible UI and an abusive community?

Like it or not, OSS is competing in a marketplace. It doesn't need to win on all axes, but it needs to win on some outside of "free"

[kibwen]

The distinction between "developers use this" and "developers work on this" is irrelevant in this context, because to a first approximation no developer volunteers their time to software they do not themselves use or hope to use. If nobody wants to use your software, there is nobody who will take time out to contribute to it.

Secondly, nobody is suggesting that free software should not try to compete on non-philosophical terms. What people are suggesting is that a volunteer project cannot perpetually out-compete a well-funded proprietary competitor. If people care about the continued existence of free software, then they will at times have to console themselves with using software that, while hopefully fit for purpose, is quite possibly not best-in-class.

[ahartmetz]

If you take care of your own interests in a more thoughtful way than "I want what works best and I want it now", Free Software looks much better. Short-term pragmatism can shoot you in the foot long-term. Lock-in and control are very real things.

[groby_b]

And long-term zealotry can shoot you in the foot long-term, too.

There are trade-offs. OSS can shift trade-offs on some of the axes, but that's about a cultural change.

It means giving up on the ludicrous idea that GitHub is bad because it "runs proprietary JavaScript executed in our browsers". It means realizing that "writing code" is a tiny part of creating a useful product. It means giving up on the disdain for all things non-engineering. It means welcoming people into the community who "just" want to write documentation, or work on UX, or any number of other things. It means letting go of overblown rhetoric like "we're the resistance now".

Above all, it's about realizing that it's not about "choosing a fight", but creating a better community.

[ahartmetz]

You are really making a lot of negative assumptions here. I happen to work (a little, I used to do more) on a F/OSS project that is all about user interface, and when I have no good idea for a UI, I ask an expert. Disdain for UX?? Please. Maybe you're thinking of that guy, I forget his name, that came up with git. He's very pragmatic about licensing, you'd like him.

(I actually think Linus is a positive figure overall, I just really can't stand git's UI)

[jakelazaroff]

I don't understand, though — there are so many cases in which free software dominates because it's better, despite proprietary alternatives from companies with deep pockets.

Most servers run Linux and Apache or nginx. The most popular CMS is WordPress. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, and MongoDB are the most popular databases.

On macOS, the most common shell is bash, and most of the commands are free. According to the 2019 Stack Overflow developer survey, two of the three most popular development environments are the open-source Visual Studio Code and Notepad++. The most popular web browser was Firefox for a while, but even Chrome is based on a ton of open-source technologies.

Most people aren't picking these tools because they have some principled stance on free software, they're picking them because they're just plain better.

[scarface74]

How many of those products that you mentioned that are free are backed and for all intents and purposes controlled by commercial backers? Would the community maintain any of them to a re al degree if the backing company abandoned then?

[arctantwo]

Does it matter? If VSCode gets canned, or WordPress gets ruined, why should I, the user using the software to make a blog, give a damn? If VSCode goes there's another one I can switch to. If WordPress goes there's five million other blogging platforms I can switch to. The format that the content (i.e., the configuration, settings, presentation, etc) may all be proprietary, but so what? I have absolutely no allegiance to VSCode, MySQL, whatever. I just use the tool that made the most sense at the time, to accomplish what I wanted to at the time. Times change and if it means I switch tools then so be it. Who cares.

Edit:

I'm speaking from the perspective of an upper 20something. I'm part of a generation that jumps jobs when the opportunity is better, or just because "it's been too long", not the one of years past where I'd be expected to work my way through the same company my entire life. With that said: if my new job says "we use Slack" then I use Slack, end of story. If they say "we use IRC" then I'd Google for how to use IRC because I have never ever used it in my entire life, never read up anything about it in my entire life, and I definitely don't hold IRC in high reverence like many posters here do. All I can see when I google IRC is that it looks ugly and honestly, that's what's most important to me these days because I have to look at, and interact with, the thing for 8+ hours a day so the least it could do is work out of the box, look modern, and doesn't need me to waste hours fussing with some dotfiles to get it to look the way I want, which is exactly how most modern chatting apps look (again: to me it's a waste of time, when I can just grab a off the shelf solution).

I appreciate that there is open source, and that there are free programs out there. I appreciate all the libraries that make my life easier. But the thing is, these are all tools I use to do a job. I don't care at all about the history of say gcc. All I care is that it works and compiles my programs, and if it does, then so be it. And if it doesn't? There are other options, icc, llvm, etc. My point is that at the end of the day, all I want is a tool to achieve a solution, and who makes that tool, or the history behind that tool, doesn't matter to me at all. It's not even part of the equation.

[anonymou2]

I, I, I, I, I, all I care, .... that's really the problem that we face.

[Crinus]

> Who cares.

When the "new" tool is worse than the "old" tool, i care (and yes, the "new" tool can be worse - and often is - yet displace the "old" one, not because of its quality, but because of external reasons - like the developers of the "old" tool being unable to sustain its development).

[detaro]

> If WordPress goes there's five million other blogging platforms I can switch to.

Have you done a full migration of a grown Wordpress blog to another system, without breaking stuff? It's not something you do on a weekend or two. Changing away from a tool that holds lots of data and configuration is expensive.

[ahartmetz]

By the way, IRC doesn't look like anything. It's a protocol. It looks like your client software.

[pjmlp]

Yes it does, because someone has actually to do it and given how much FOSS developers get paid back from the community, we end up having lousy tooling, because it always gets implemented from scratch.

[jakelazaroff]

What if you're using a product and its community abandons it? This isn't a unique issue to products with commercial backers.

[kazinator]

Free software without a community is a thing; it's perfectly fine, and in fact better off without all the flies buzzing around it.

Proprietary software that is years past its support date, from a company that has not existed in years, yet still in use, is also a thing.

The one kind of entity that dies instantly when its backing goes away is a proprietary website.

[crankylinuxuser]

Until you want your data.

Turns out data roach motelling is a big thing. And it's even better for the corp interests if they can tie hardware and software to irreplaceable APIs that lock the user down to the whims of the owner.

It's time to take the fight back to "Owner"... If you purchased it, why can't you do what you want? Why are you prevented from doing arbitrary actions?

[Naac]

Case in point, it's surprisingly frustrating to get your photos off of Instagram on mobile.

[Drdrdrq]

>> Why have users chosen those environments?

> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3, they are on B without a second thought.

Convenience always wins. Always. Users do care about free (as in beer) and they care if the product or service will disappear without warning (hello Google!). But the definitions of FOSS are so strict that they harm developers, and thus products, and thus convenience for users.

OP is describing the symptoms of this phenomena.

[kazinator]

Traditional free software developers do not use the most convenient program without caring about freedom.

Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator.

GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it. (I've only ever used GIMP since 1996; I have no idea about Photoshop and don't care; it's not free, won't use it.)

People went through all sorts of inconveniences to use free software, like manually figuring out monitor clock timings to stick into their X configuration, building their own custom kernels and whatnot.

You can't say "convenience wins" with a straight face; that's like saying free software doesn't exist.

[romwell]

>Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator.

Hahaha. Have you tried to write a piece of mathematics in MS Word? I did. It's a torture I wouldn't wish on anyone I know.

Mathematicians are all about convenience; so much so that proprietary LaTeX Editors were quite popular before FOSS caught up (remember WinEdt?).

But LaTeX itself - it's the most convenient tool to write and share mathematics that's ever been made. It's unsurpassed. It's required if you want to publish, because all the journals use LaTeX, and most math books are made with LaTeX.

It's so good that people will literally think you are an idiot if you are not using it[1] and won't believe your results.

And ArXiV, have you heard of ArXiV? No LaTeX, no ArXiV.

And trust me, most mathematicians don't care much about FOSS. But they care about not spending too much effort on making their results presentable and shareable. LaTeX -> PDF is the path of least resistance.

[1]https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304

[magduf]

>Otherwise, for instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio or what have you.

If you're working with embedded Linux, Visual Studio isn't going to be much help for debugging on a target.

>Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator.

LaTeX does some things much better than Word, and Illustrator is very expensive.

>GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it.

GIMP is free. Photoshop is not.

You seem to be assuming the people have unlimited money to purchase software licenses. Many free software programs are used not because they're better, but just because they're free and good enough. If I just want to crop and rescale some photos or something, why on earth would I buy a Photoshop license when I can just download and use GIMP for free?

[kazinator]

Many proprietary programs also get used because they are good enough. Not everyone wants to do a simple thing using some UI that has grown into a Boeing 747 cockpit.

Some Windows users use neither GIMP nor Photoshop to crop an image, but rather MS Paint, which is comes with the OS, so it is "no additional cost", and requires next to no training to use.

MS Paint has vastly diminished functionality compared to either GIMP or Photoshop.

[magduf]

Maybe cropping wasn't the best example for me to use, but there are many people who want to do more advanced photo editing than that (which is beyond the capabilities of MS Paint), but do not want to pay $$$ for Photoshop. Those people frequently use GIMP, simply because it's free and it works well enough.

[thrower123]

> nobody would be debugging with gdb, rather than Visual Studio

If Visual Studio ran on Linux, would anybody bother with gdb? Currently, the second-highest voted UserVoice issue for Visual Studio is people asking for a Linux version (and rather hilariously not understanding what a colossal rewrite that would entail...)

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

> Nobody would be LaTeXing instead of using MS Word or Adobe Illustrator.

LaTeX might just be easier than trying to typeset something reliably in Word. I know I always wrote in plain-text and then did a final pass to paste and format it into Word immediately before printing.

> GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop (if I believe what people say), yet people still use it.

Photoshop is stupidly expensive still, and cracking software has fallen out of favor

[kazinator]

> second-highest voted UserVoice issue for Visual Studio is people asking for a Linux version

How many of these users are long time free software developers, though, who did free software long before it could just be a reluctant aspect of a job you land into?

[keithnz]

Interestingly enough Visual Studio now supports cross platform debugging ( you still need Visual Studio running on windows, but it can debug a linux based program )

[kazinator]

A variant called Embedded Visual Studio already supported cross debugging of Windows CE targets twenty years ago. (I was there and used it). Maybe that's not quite cross-platform, but kind of half-way.

[Drdrdrq]

I don't think a few of us using Gimp (yes, I am an occassional user) will stand in the way of convenience winning. Hige majority of people do (and will) use Photoshop, simply because it meets their needs better.

[floatboth]

GIMP certainly wins on convenience: you just download it, no credit cards or shady torrents.

[kazinator]

> it meets their needs better.

That's hardly the case; they are not even aware of the existence of alternatives.

Most of people's occasional image fix-up needs could be met just by MS Paint, which they would find easier to use. Problem is, they don't even know that exists and that they have it pre-installed, let alone that GIMP exists.

[beanland]

A quick Google search for cheap/free Photoshop alternatives will usually get people to GIMP in a couple of clicks. Why are you saying that Photoshop users are unaware of any alternatives? It seems logical to me that anyone in the market for this kind of software would be interested in saving some money before shelling out for PS. Am I wrong?

[zapzupnz]

> For instance, nobody would be debugging with gdb

I mean, I debug with lldb which is free and open. Sure, I do the debugging through the non-free(-as-in-freedom), non-open Xcode, but that's because Xcode lets me harness the power of lldb in a manner that suits me.

There's nothing stopping free and open software projects from being delivered in a user-friendly manner. I'm sure there are plenty of people using gdb and lldb with fully-free and fully-open editors and IDEs.

Sometimes it just takes a mindset adjustment to see that what is most often considered inconvenient, and that followers of free software doctrines must begrudgingly accept as their lot, can actually be delivered in a user-friendly manner that meets the proprietary-software-users' expectations.

[p2t2p]

It is not about "convenience". It is about "be done with it and get on with my life".

I don't want to use an IDE, I want to debug a Java program. I don't want to use video editor, I want to have a video. I don't want to use 3D redactor, I want a 3D print something.

I can go on forever. The problem with lots of free software folks and linux crowd is fetish of tools. Tools for the sake of tools. I couldn't care less about tools, I want to achieve something, I'll pick up whatever tool that allows me to achieve that quickly and effortlessly. And I'm telling you this as someone who's using linux and writing a bookmark manager for myself in Go right now to pair with menu because all other ways of doing bookmark management suck.

[dilawar]

I agree with the sentiments you have expressed. But there is no way around it. People who develop for 'free' will write tools for the sake of tools but few of them will become numpy, latex, docker, Haskell etc.. You are interested in banyan tree, you'll get it if you find the way around the jungle or use a guide.

[p2t2p]

I just re-read it and I have no idea how I didn't notice my brain burping out Russian word instead of English one.

%s/redactor/editor

Separate question why would it do that

[the_af]

> Convenience always wins

Yes, but convenience also leads to greedy "algorithms" prone to getting stuck in local maxima. Convenience can make us lazy and choose the wrong long-term solutions.

This applies to more things than just tech ("convenience" may make us choose foods that are wrong for our health, for example).

[eeZah7Ux]

> Convenience always wins. Always.

Not at all. There are million examples of human society choosing long term and social benefits over short term and personal rewards.

[jcastro]

> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software.

It's attitudes like this that make people really not care about FOSS. Yelling at people because they're not using IRC instead of slack isn't a good way to convince anyone.

[kuschku]

When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?

[komali2]

For me the issue with IRC protocol (not that I know much about it outside my interaction with UIs built around it) was authentication, and connectivity.

So I had an android IRC app for a bit, some top paid one, and get booted from a bunch of my favorite channels because apparently it was just sat in my pocket cycling my connection and flooding the channel with join/unjoins.

That, plus the weird way to authenticate doing /msg Nickserv identify. That might be just how the server I was connecting to was implemented, but it felt fucky.

[mjevans]

That's more an issue with your connection. Mobile devices have really bad connections. IRC was //never// designed with them in mind; they literally didn't exist and were not likely to exist for decades (which it has been).

IRC was designed, mostly, for two types of users: A) Large institution users who had a fixed link to the internet and ran in their shell on a mainframe. B) Dial-in users, who's devices mostly stayed connected, and when they disconnected, usually required manual intervention to get back on.

Anyone, and I mean ANYONE using a mobile phone SHOULD be using a 'bouncer' or other gateway to access a live communications environment. This would be more like use case A where someone has a small agent on a slice of a server they 'trust' and that maintains state (for their client) and stateful connection (for links to other servers and users).

IIRC, Quassel IRC has such a client/server model for the client, there are probably others too.

[zapzupnz]

I guess that's the thing, though. Yes, mobile users should be using a bouncer — but who's going to set it up for them, who's going to host it for free and in a manner that it has guaranteed next-to-no-downtime?

It occurs to me that if IRC networks hosted their own bouncers, but that these bouncers were written efficiently to exchange data directly with the IRC servers' and their database rather than keep individual logs and so on, we might have something close to the "open-the-app-and-see-past-messages-without-needing-to-be-permanently-connected" quality that people have come to expect from instant messengers, Slack, Discord, etc.

(but then you might as well just write such functionality directly into the IRCd)

[caf]

(but then you might as well just write such functionality directly into the IRCd)

Nah, such a thing would make most sense as a separate daemon that uses the server-server protocol to connect to the ircd (ie. it appears to the rest of the network as just another ircd).

It wouldn't be hard to build such a thing, the hard part would be convincing an existing IRC network to run it.

[kuschku]

> That, plus the weird way to authenticate doing /msg Nickserv identify. That might be just how the server I was connecting to was implemented, but it felt fucky.

That's what SASL has been for for over a decade nowadays :)

https://i.k8r.eu/Jr-NBg.png

[jcastro]

Maybe consider the UX that Slack gives users instead of just cloning the UI on top of IRC and expect it to work out?

[kuschku]

That's a major part of what I've done recently, trying to significantly reduce complexity, and contribute to clients to make them more discoverable and require less knowledge to fully utilize them.

The goal is to get rid of the historic interfaces which required a lot of RTFM, and instead to allow users to discover functionality through the UI easily.

If you have any suggestions on what to improve regarding UX of Quasseldroid (my main project), I'd love to hear suggestions, as I'm always interested in improving its UX and learning more about UX design. After all, I, as quasseldroid maintainer, am just one student, not a team of highly paid UX designers.

(And personally, I'm a huge fan of tools like Zulip, Mattermost and Matrix as well — we're all fighting on the same side, after all :)

[pixelrevision]

IRC had its problems but I’d still rather be able to control my ui rather than have a bloated web browser running all day.

[jamesgeck0]

IRCCloud is okay, but the UX/UI isn't anywhere near as nice as Slack.

[jeena]

Why would you need to use Slack (or IRC) when there is

    https://rocket.chat/
    https://zulipchat.com/
    https://matrix.org/
    https://mattermost.com/

[Crinus]

Probably because the few people who want to use alternatives to Slack are spread among these four alternatives instead of using one and sticking with it.

And honestly, of all the alternatives, IRC is by far the most popular one (and the other alternatives have IRC bridges) hence the most likely to stay around the longest.

Also the simplest to implement, which helps a lot too.

[kuschku]

That may be true, but it's good enough that it should be easily usable by developers.

And I'm personally working on Quasseldroid, improving its UI to make it much more usable.

If you have suggestions on how to make Quasseldroid usable for the people that refuse to use IRC, I'd love to hear them :)

[jamesgeck0]

> it's good enough that it should be easily usable by developers.

Sure, but the reason all the developers at my workplace use Slack is because we have to communicate with a lot of people who aren't developers.

Slack's good UX extends beyond the basic chat interface to configuration, administration, and initial signup. It's significantly easier for someone nontechnical to toss money at Slack to get a new private space than it is with IRC. The first page of "IRC hosting" search results on Google for me are mostly shell accounts; nothing turnkey and professional looking that a business person could/would use.

[ummonk]

I know plenty who use IRCCloud. There is nothing FOSS about it, though.

[malvosenior]

Neither of those look as good as Slack imho. Regardless, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with Slack that you can't with IRC. Emoji reactions, voice/video/screenshare, easily post files and images... Plus there's a unified experience for all users that's not client dependent, no burdensome technical or protocol jargon, no federated servers (or servers to think about at all)...

I've used IRC quite a bit but Slack is light years beyond in terms of the UX of even the nicest IRC clients. I think Discord is probably even better than Slack though.

[kazinator]

"federated servers" is the only way to maintain a form of freedom while (out of necessity) operating software as a service.

If you think that you can't do free software development without relying on all the capabilities of Slack, then the honest thing to do is to quit and spend the rest of your days just working on proprietary stuff. You obviously prefer the solution which has features over any other concern, so why would you waste your time having anything to do with free software?

Richard Stallman obviously used proprietary software. But not past the point when he had replace it, even imperfectly: "I began work on GNU Emacs in September 1984, and in early 1985 it was beginning to be usable. This enabled me to begin using Unix systems to do editing; having no interest in learning to use vi or ed, I had done my editing on other kinds of machines until then." [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf] This tells us that Stallman used Unix. Well, why wouldn't he have; what other practical way was there to code anything? (One supposes he could have started from the bootloader on up, like the Unix guys before him.)

Stallman wouldn't use Unix today, since it has been replaced by free software, and he wouldn't use arguments like, well, such and such proprietary Unix has better memory management or faster I/O, so I will still use that.

If you're using things like Slack or Github without the slightest intent of working toward replacing them, yet using them for free software activities, then that is a comically conflicted position.

[oneplane]

Federation has been tried a lot and in the end it always fails, even if it's the best solution. XMMP is pretty much dead regarding free use, IRC for a lot of FOSS project is slowing dying, there were a lot of federated social media projects that simply failed because they couldn't attract anyone.

Being technically the best (or the best in 'freedom') doesn't seem relevant to anyone.

[wahern]

Centralization has never succeeded. Let's see how popular Slack is in 5 years. 10 years. There's no reason to believe it won't go the way of ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc.

IP, TCP, SMTP, HTTP, these are fundamentally technologies of federation. They succeeded and continue to succeed spectacularly. However, with the commercialization of the Internet there are much stronger countercurrents. I still expect federated solutions to succeed, but adoption will be slower and punctuated, and in the interim there'll be countless proprietary also rans.

[rjsw]

I would guess that he was editing source on ITS or a Lisp Machine before this point.

I think you can see some evidence of what people thought were development machines by the fact that Lisp Machines only seem to have been NFS servers, not NFS clients.

[malvosenior]

Yeah, I don't think so. I work on other OSS and happily use Slack because it's fun and easy (I used to use IRC). I'm not conflicted at all because I appreciate a good UX. I think it would be totally awesome if more open source developers realized that people will use whatever is better for them which often doesn't mean prioritizing openness over usability or features.

I totally get the value of a non-corporate, non-centralized solution. It just needs to have at least as good of a UX for me to switch back to using it.

[kazinator]

You're only narrowly escape being conflicted because you identify as an "OSS" developer rather than a "free software" developer. The term "open source" and its identification was basically crafted to avoid being conflicted this way.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

> A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, “I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?” This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

> The free software activist will say, “Your program is very attractive, but I value my freedom more. So I reject your program. I will get my work done some other way, and support a project to develop a free replacement.” If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

Relying on Slack, Github and what have you is clearly not to "get my work done some other way, and support a project to develop a free replacement.” It aligns with attitude exemplified by the "pure open source enthusiast".

[kuschku]

Emoji reactions are actually a thing nowadays thanks to IRCv3 :)

And personally I consider the slack UI, especially due to the different workspaces, relatively unintuitive.

[thaumasiotes]

> there's a bunch of stuff you can do with Slack that you can't with IRC. Emoji reactions

I don't see a big difference between sending the message :rose: in Slack and having the client display it as a picture of a rose, vs sending the message :rose: in IRC and having the client display it as a picture of a rose. Emoji don't enter into it.

Reactions, maybe.

[floatboth]

Forget IRC. You can do everything with Matrix :)

[subway]

Kinda-sorta?

Matrix is an incredibly centralized service masquerading as an easily self-hosted distributed service. The moment you try to get a non-technical user connected to a homeserver other than matrix.org, all hell starts to break loose.

It's bad enough that both France (tchap) and Purism have created their own client forks to make on-boarding somewhat tolerable at the expense of really painful rebases against upstream Riot, while Riot tries to get it's shit together on the non-matrix.org user story.

Mattermost has a slightly less painful situation -- they provide a relatively easy to brand/preconfigure client (and fantastic docs on how to do so: https://docs.mattermost.com/mobile/mobile-compile-yourself.h... ), but you lose out on federation and self-service sign-up, leaving your community isolated (sometimes a pro, sometimes a con).

[Arathorn]

This is pretty disingenuous - we have spent loads of time making Riot work well with self-hosted servers (c.f. the current login & registration flows, which explicitly prompt you to select a server), and around 50% of the network are running their own servers. Our intention is to turn off the original matrix.org server once we have decentralised accounts and the network is healthy enough.

[api]

> If software A requires four clicks to do something, but B has a way to do it in 3

The difference is usually more like "software A requires an hour of setup and constant maintenance on a dedicated VM or container due to dozens of dependencies, and software B requires 3 clicks"

[kccqzy]

And also the difference between "the code is inelegant and sucks and I'll remove it, damn the users" and "the code may be ugly but the feature users want is ugly so let's do it".

Case in point, I recently upgraded the computer of a non-technical person from Ubuntu 18.10 to 19.04. And now desktop icons are completely broken. It's been reimplemented in JS, with horrible performance, and doesn't even support features like dragging an icon to a folder. Their reason for removal? A bunch of technobabble no user would understand. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/158

[price]

Stuff gets removed from proprietary software all the damn time. To pick a notorious example: have you tried to use Google Reader lately? :-P Others I've personally noticed in the last couple of years include features of Dropbox; of Gmail; of Facebook; of Google Search; and various startups acquired and shut down -- including a mobile app with no backend of its own.

When stuff gets removed or shut down, the basic reason is that it takes work to keep it going, and someone decides to stop allocating any work to that. Even with client-side software with no service to run (like that mobile app), the platforms they run on change, and it takes work to keep up.

And that's exactly what I see in that GNOME issue you link to. There's a bunch of technical detail about why it's so much work -- but the point they're making is it's been a lot of work to keep that feature going the way it was, and it'd be even more work to continue doing so as the rest of the software on the desktop changes around it in the ways that are planned. And so they decide to drop the existing thing and build a new one in a much easier way.

The only difference from proprietary software is that everyone has the option to step in and say, no, I'm going to go pick up that work, and everyone's welcome to use my version instead. In fact, GNOME makes a great example, because there have been a bunch of popular projects precisely about doing that with previous decisions they've made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_(software) is one of the bigger ones.

If people had that option with Google Reader, it'd be alive today. (I'm told it was a very small amount of work to keep running, and when the ax fell on it many Googlers pleaded to be allowed to just keep it running on their own time.) Ditto for many of the other proprietary things I've missed after they went away.

[kazinator]

On the other hand, there is proprietary software still running whose company has been gone for decades.

Stuff does not get removed from proprietary software installations spontaneously, unless there are automatic updates (which can be turned off).

Stuff spontaneously disappears from a proprietary website, and the users can't do anything about it.

Proprietary websites are a whole new form of social harm that makes plain old proprietary software look virtuous in comparison.

[price]

> On the other hand, there is proprietary software still running whose company has been gone for decades.

True, I'm sure!

Equally true of free software... and indeed when that situation does happen, you're in rather better shape if it's free software than proprietary.

I think there are good reasons for people to keep their software installations generally up to date, though -- certainly anything that's exposed to today's Internet. And for a given version of $component, the OS versions that shipped it will only continue getting updates for so many years. Because of that, in the example I was replying to I don't think it's unreasonable to see an announcement that, strictly, just says "this feature will be dropped from future versions of this software", and think of it for practical purposes as "this feature will be going away".

[michaelmrose]

Its more like if it takes 12 clicks to do it but I was shown how to do so at school/work, or it was preinstalled I will keep on clicking.

[em-bee]

good point on the "reluctant" FOSS developers. i see this a lot. big companies have teams that work on FOSS projects, but most of the people in those teams don't understand what the fuss is about. they come to FOSS events to promote their products and treat them no different than their proprietary ones.

the thing is, their leaders may actually understand FOSS and believe in it because they can see the benefits, but they don't understand that for the developers below them it is just another job.

i have argued that exact point in a company where i worked, telling the leaders that if they want to get the developers to make actual voluntary contributions and participate in the FOSS community the leaders need to set an example and actively motivate the developers to do so.

just assigning someone to work on a FOSS project is not enough to help that person to join the FOSS community. there are exceptions of course, where someone interacting with the community realizes that there is more to it and becomes drawn into it, but that's not the norm.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

>about about providing reliable commodity middleware for locked-down devices and cloud services.

Free software made cheap, network centric computing feasible. This led from a model where the user ran their applications (open or closed) on their machines to one which turned the user's machine into a dumb terminal to access the network. This resulted in defacto loss of user privacy and control.

In a world where Windows was dominant and you had to pay a per cpu licensing fee, would companies be trying to put everything on the web, or would they create more apps that ran locally with some network based syncing? It would have been a smart computer, dumb network world instead of the dumb computer, smart network world we have now.

One of the great ironies of computing is how free software in its quest to enable user freedom actually enabled a world with less defacto user freedom than before.

[ThrowawayR2]

> Free software made cheap, network centric computing feasible.

Anybody remember the dot-com boom? Sun Microsystem's silly "The Network Is The Computer." ads? No? Linux wasn't even a blip on the radar back then at the enterprise level.

> In a world where Windows was dominant and you had to pay a per cpu licensing fee, would companies be trying to put everything on the web, or would they create more apps that ran locally with some network based syncing?

Um, obviously yes? The fact that Sun and the other UNIX server vendors and Oracle other server software vendors were charging various fees for their OS and software, on a per server or per CPU basis, did nothing to put the brakes on the dotcom boom. Network-centric computing took off well before free software became the buzzword of the mid to late '00s.

[regularfry]

Linux itself might not have been (although I'd challenge that if I could remember dates a bit better); Apache and Perl certainly was.

[pjmlp]

In 2000 we were delivering UNIX software into production on Aix, Solaris and HP-UX boxes, my employer at the time did not consider either GNU/Linux or BSD fit for the quality standards we expected from a standard UNIX, although we did use them on some internal servers, including our builds.

[AnimalMuppet]

Free software gave much greater freedom to those who want it. Turns out, though, that the large majority of users don't actually want it.

[raverbashing]

And that's why everything is continue to go downhill in the Free Software world

Because of the mentality that UX problems are just "the user being lazy"

IRC stopped in time. Linux desktop is a mess and have very weird ideas about UX (especially Gnome, they love making things "simple" by shipping a car with no gearbox but only one speed)

"Freedom" is a "cost/quality" like any other, some people might value it the most, some people might value it the least, but it is less important than other factors.