On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 04:39:10PM +0100, Nicolas George wrote: > tomas@tuxteam.de (12020-03-26): > > [3] I don't think it's really intentional. It's an unfortunate and > > contagious antipattern, a bit like prions transmit Creutzfeld-Jacob. > > But nowadays I suspect that some actors help its expansion because > > it helps their business interests. Or something. Glad my strange rant finds some appreciation. I'm having a hard time to even pack this in words. > This specific one is probably just laziness. But you are right to > emphasize this phenomenon. That's the point. Lazyness is always a part of it. But there are counter-parts. They might be more sinister. Or not. Like in other realms: don't invest in education and people will stay more malleable. > The PR of the Libre Software movement has been successful: people have > internalized the fact that Libre Software is good. But the education > efforts have been unsuccessful: people have not learned why Libre > Software is good. It is kinda difficult to explain, isn't it? > As a result, we see many actors who try to reap the benefits without > sowing the seeds: to get the PR boost of “doing Open Source” without > actually giving their code. To do that, they give the raw code itself, > but make it immensely complicated, and do not give the know-how to work > on it, or even to make it work. > > I like your comparison with prions: when over-engineered software > become frequent, good software needs to become more complex in order to > be able to interact with it. Two more links, one from aeons ago (nearly a quarter-century) by Raph Levien (of Ghostscript and many more fames), "he decommoditization of protocols" [1] and a fairly recent one by Drew DeVault "The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers" [2]. Finding commonalities and differences is left as an exercise for the reader :-) In some way, we've won. In some other, we've lost. We are in a similar stuation to the Bad Old Times of "best viewed with Internet Explorer", where one company controls the clients (Android, Chrome). But they are "Open Source", somehow. Cheers [1] https://www.levien.com/free/decommoditizing.html [2] https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html -- tomás
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