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Eh. One thing proprietary software has going for it is clear design goals and the leadership to create a cohesive UX. Open source projects tend to be a grab bag of tools that work well for developers.
Not saying I don’t love FOSS, but there’s definitely stuff that proprietary software does better in a practical sense, whatever else your opinion of it.
Foss struggles to get dev time. If everything was foss, we could coordinate easier.
I am a designer with 20 years of experience. I’ve tried contributing to FOSS, but the developers are incredibly stubborn and work purely guided by their own assumptions. Hence the horrible UX on so much FOSS. There are more than enough design people that would love to contribute, but are met with nothing but ridicule and insults.
That has not much do to with FOSS but with the people you are working with. Proprietary software you can’t even contribute freely to begin with
This has been my experience as well but as a coder.
I can’t count the number of contributions I’ve made, many of them minor. I’m talking 20-30 lines of code max.
I can count on two hands the number that have been either accepted or declined for a legitimate reason.
Counterpoint - if everything was FOSS it would be absolute chaos with no direction, conflicting goals, incomplete projects, and limited oversight… and also lots of inter-dev-team drama and forking.
For instance…
it would be absolute chaos with no direction, conflicting goals, incomplete projects, and limited oversight
You are describing the current scenario where everything is proprietary
cohesive
gestures to MS products for the last 20 years
gestures to Windows’ disk partitioner
Fair dues, Microsoft managed to fuck that up in spite of itself.
There’s a very good reasons why people and organisations will pay for proprietary software when there is a free alternative available. I’ve used FOSS word processors before, for example, and they’re okay, but nothing like what Microsoft Office can do. Same with video editing.
There’s a very good reasons why people and organisations will pay for proprietary software when there is a free alternative available.
And there are also very good reasons why people and organisations are stopping relying on proprietary software and switching to open alternatives that won’t lock them up.
As someone who uses Gnome familly applications daily, I have to disagree with the notion that bad UX is fundamental to FOSS software. The gnome apps and shell all follow the same set of UX guidelines and feel quite cohesive as a result. I can definetly see where you get the idea of bad UX in foss though (looking at you, GIMP and Libreoffice)
I’m not saying it’s fundamental, sorry, I should have specified. You’re exactly right, GNOME is driven by it’s Foundation and so there is leadership in place to make sure that the software ends up as a cohesive whole. Software projects that don’t, or that create one after the fact, tend to be a lot less so.
Cries in CAD
substance painter proprietary file formats. PROPRIETARY FILE FORMATS.
What happened to my needs being primary and the device being secondary, serving me? The device is not primary, it does not have rights. Sales is transferring rights from one person or entity to another, for their use, no strings attached. We have completely upended the primary idea of commerce.
Perhaps some Ferengi-style Rules of Acquisition are in order. And some kind of death penalty for CEOs may help.
If capitalism didn’t exist, we would have free, infinite electricity courtesy of Nikola Tesla.
Nahman, I‘m pretty sure Chicago would still be Chicago
Like lions and gazelles living in harmony. Never will happen. Nor should it.