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by TeMPOraL
4231 days ago
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A small tangent. > and doesn't give a fuck if the device works after you've sold Which is even worse on the web, where most of the time that someone also doesn't give a fuck about you at all and will just pull the product the moment he gets enough users to make an exit. There are good things about having a working binary on your device; the author can't just take it away from you just because he doesn't care about the product anymore. |
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Tragically, in the modern software world, that often isn't true either.
Buggy junk gets shipped routinely even when people are paying real money for it. Software developers assume you'd love to have their regular updates, even if those updates also change interfaces and modify or even outright break/remove functionality however they feel like. If you don't apply the updates, you don't get security fixes either, so for any software that is at all involved with sharing data or communicating on-line many users have little choice. The idea of long term support for any stable software that people actually rely on is a joke for many projects. And that's before we even get to all the DRM/activation junk.
Ironically, the worst offenders are probably Chrome and Firefox. IME, the next worst offenders are often the supposedly high-end professional software that comes with a thousands-of-dollars-per-seat price tag -- assuming you can even buy a copy instead of renting it these days.
I'm mildly optimistic that a new generation of software seems to be arriving where people are expected to pay for good work but the prices are much more reasonable: not App Store peanuts, not Enterprice Pricing (call for a quote, because hell will freeze over before we publish any useful information publicly). A lot of these tools are relatively small or specialised, but they do their jobs well, they get very favourable feedback from users, and they have real, commercially viable development organisations behind them. Also, they rarely incorporate the user-hostile junk. So good work can still be done commercially, and of course for some of the important geek-friendly software like development tools and OS/server/networking infrastructure there are Open Source projects that are usefully stable, reliable and comprehensive. I look forward hopefully to a day when these kinds of projects are the norm for software we rely on, and we can all get on with using our computers without constantly fighting with them.