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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

I have a vision of software literacy- where 99.9% of people can write their own.

I think all the open source in the world isn't going to help when the battle at the bottom is effectively lost already. The 99% don't even have root access to their own devices and don't care, let alone have any desire to write their own software no matter how easy it is. It's also only getting worse. Every year the number of vendors producing unlockable devices shrinks. Every year Windows and macOS get a little less power-user-friendly. Democratic software development is building a mansion on a hill while the town in the valley is on fire.

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I like to believe that this is just a phase. At some point in the future, customizable, user-respecting, fully local (or self-hostable) software is going to become trendy again. People are really getting sick and tired of everything trying its damnest to manipulate them into driving a metric or just be an art piece instead of a tool.

In the much more popular hobby of cars it went away and has stayed that way in developed countries with the control infrastructure while in developing economies they still fix everything themselves. In another 20 years poor nations will still probably be on the same vehicles or cars from a generation are hollowed out while developed countries’ cars are even worse.

I see zero changes in this market bifurcation pattern regardless of industry. It’s not like people are making their own clothes much even in developing countries because we overproduce cheap clothes now anyway, for example.

On the other hand 100s of millions of those devices ship with a programming tool on the home screen where you can create tiny pieces of functionality and hook them into every system and third party application (Apple Shortcuts).

But yeah, it‘s not the same. It doesn‘t get you anywhere close to "producing“ the real software. You‘re programming in a walled garden layer above userspace that you can‘t get out of. To me, these kinds of things are enough to give me hope though (setting aside the ideals of open source). The incentives for learning how to "produce“ real software are strong enough. If more people can build tools for themselves, I‘m happy.

I think part of the problem is the concept of an "application", which is a prepackaged collection of functionalities. The user has to start the application to use a function. If software was developed as standalone functions that users can pipe together through drag-and-drop (or some other means), to create their own "applications", we might be able to reach a happy medium. A non-CLI version of the unix philosophy.

Why would you need root access and unlockable devices to produce code ? Do you have access to the microcode of your CPU ? Can’t you code on a Mac ?

I agree that it would be better for everyone if there were competitive fully open source platforms across the entire stack, but don’t confuse the ability to produce and use open source software with the requirement that absolutely all the stack must be open source. Only Siths deal in absolutes.

>Why would you need root access and unlockable devices to produce code ?

Because without this your projects are always at the mercy of Microsoft's auto update. There's more to life than MVC frameworks. Some people want to be in control of their data. On, say, LineageOS you can rewrite system apps; on iOS your phone will always be a cop and you can't change that.

Why would you need root access and unlockable devices to produce code ?

You don't. You need root access and unlocked devices to produce people who give a shit about coding. We're training people to look under the hood less and less and less every year.

You don’t need root access to produce code. The number of people with access to code development and execution tools (i.e. a browser and a text editor) has never been higher. Even on iOS you can get started with a free service like GitHub or Neocities and do everything through Safari.

It’s 100% a matter of skills and motivation.

The web browser just doesn't matter if you care about the operating system code that it relies on. Without unlocked devices you don't have the freedom to code what you want to code. If I'm using a phone that sends my pics to the cops and advertising companies I don't really care about playing with MVC frameworks. Do you want the freedom to code whatever you want to code or do you just want to play in Microsoft's kiddie pool?

I am a software developer myself and I've never even tried to change my OS code... it's absurd to think an average person would want to do that! They just might want to control their dildo, or lights... or turn on their AC at a certain time... wtf man, how out of touch can someone get?

>it's absurd to think an average person would want to do that

Hate to break it to you but the average person does not wake up and think "you know what I want to do for the next 40 years? look at code for 8 hours a day." Wanting to do this is a weird thing (and that's okay) and it means you have different desires than my mom who likes watching youtube on her iphone.

I am a software developer myself and I change my OS code every day. Its not even my primary job.

No-one is claiming all code needs root. But you are painfully wrong for implying no (homebrew) code needs root.

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