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Comment by LightFog | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t ’giving up convenience in the name of freedom’ one of the core trade-offs you’re expected to make with free software? People buy into the ‘free’ bit of FOSS to varying degrees of course but it is disappointing that so many FOSS projects seem ok contributing so much to a proprietary product from one of the most anti-freedom corporations out there.

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Stallman said (paraphrasing) "If free software were inferior, using it would still be the right thing to do. Fortunately, it is also superior in terms of features and experience."

That being said, Stallman (still?) uses mostly terminal based software, so that take is a bit biased.

> Stallman (still?) uses mostly terminal based software, so that take is a bit biased.

The Linux terminal is fairly comfy and depending on the task, it can be vastly superior to graphical applications. The opposite can also be true for other tasks. It really depends on what someone wants to do with their computer.

> "If free software were inferior, using it would still be the right thing to do. Fortunately, it is also superior in terms of features and experience."

It blows me away just how out of touch one otherwise-intelligent man can be.

FOSS often has severe usability issues compared to popular proprietary counterparts -- just look at any article here talking about trying to use Matrix or get friends/relatives to use it, it's basically always a big dumpster fire. Yet somehow you still have people recommending it.

It is true that highest quality FOSS is found at the level of libraries and frameworks, not on the end-user app level. There's still a lot to win by improving the practices on this level, which require more than pure technical focus. And other people than devs getting involved with their skills. Requires better FOSS tools and practices to make that happen. That is a challenge for the future of FOSS. It's also one tackled by people using the FOSS apps, prepared to bear with inconveniences, give their feedback, and not ditching them on a whim for the first proprietary competitor that is better. Yes, that is not for everyone to be involved with. I am quite happy to see more people who do.

A lot of FOSS enthusiasts want the UX to be bad, because to them the UX that is bad for most people is actually fine.

I think the issue is less getting a designer interested, and more that it would be really hard to get consensus. Changing UX is more subjective AND intrusive compared to adding more features or improving performance. Changing the UI means changing people's existing flows, as opposed to a new feature that can just be one more button somewhere.

It is understandable, since the majority of FOSS enthusiasts consist of developers, techie folks. An audience of power users that indeed have different preferences for their UX. There's a lack of people involved in FOSS projects (e.g. designers) that inform these developers on the expectations of the user base that their FOSS project is targeting. FOSS devs want to see their project get uptake and use, and need different voices that tell them (with good arguments) how to achieve that. Lacking that biased UX hampers project objectives.

I don't think there is a consensus among developers of front-end FOSS that becoming the market leader is a high priority. Non-power users will never submit a PR, and rarely even write a useful bug report. They effectively give very little back to the project, except maybe some clout that comes with a large user base.

There are some exceptions, but the ones that care the most about market share either have a corporate backer that is profiting from the project (Microsoft, Chromium) or require large numbers for the project to be successful (Firefox, Fediverse).

Before striving for market share and leadership, there's product-market fit. The ambitions of FOSS projects needn't be (and often aren't) to become a leader. Offering a good alternative to some proprietary product is already a good start. FOSS projects are predominantly started and maintained by developers and this is reflected in both the tool choices and the organization / governance model of the project, which makes it hard for other stakeholders to have a proper say in it. Those are areas to focus on and where much can be improved. And with the help of said stakeholders to encourage that trend.

> the majority of FOSS enthusiasts consist of developers, techie folks.

Is this for the same reason that most Linux users don't care about free software (i.e. are happy running various proprietary blobs on Linux, Windows games in Wine etc.)

i.e. as far as I can tell most users of free software don't care about the free software aspect very much.

Talked to a Linux user about this last night and he seemed to think the "free" part means "no cost"... Sad!

Yes, but it's not constantly trying to trick you into paying, or locking you in to some format/platform that will lead to you paying. Those are also big usability issues.

No, not really. I mean, those are issues, but more of monetization than usability. The usability decrease from those things is fairly small.

Yes, they are usability issues, if I can't trust the software and need to evaluate every step it makes, because it might do something against my interests. That's quite the cognitive overload.

I'm not saying that it's strictly worse or the same as with FOSS software. Just a different tradeoff.

I think that might be wishful thinking on his part - I remember hearing about him consuming some types of web content via a friend downloading html and emailing it to him! He has spoken plenty about confronting the convenience-freedom trade off that anyone consuming software will be confronted with though.

I use FOSS because it's convenient, not for some higher philosophical principle...

If use is the only thing you do it may contribute to the Tragedy of the Commons and you undermine FOSS. If you also contribute back in some ways, even for very practical purposes, you are also serving the higher philosophical principle of FOSS.

The tragedy of the commons requires a resource that is being depleted, which definitely isn't something that merely using FOSS would do.

The effort of contributors can certainly be depleted when they see that no one cares to even submit a bug report or suggest any improvements

If you're using FOSS because it's convenient and don't have any problems, why would you suggest any improvements or report bugs?

No. Freedom includes the freedom to do what is convenient.

The tolerance of inconvenience is a practical argument. If you have non-free dependencies, the most likely scenario is that sooner or later the dependency will kill support for the project and you have no legal recourse. Eg, if a project uses Discord, at some point it will have to move away to some other technology/protocol. If it uses git, the project won't ever have to move away from git. Those predictions can be made purely from analysing the license.

Since a move is inevitable, it really should make more sense to use FOSS protocols and clients from the get go. People don't though, and I don't pretend to understand the reasons. But what I can confidently say that Discord is going to become inhospitable for the project eventually.

This doesn’t seem to cover the ‘social’ or community side of software freedom though. Sure you have the freedom to make life tough for your future self for short term gain - but by embracing non-free software you are ultimately limiting the freedom of others via network effects and lock-ins. Exactly what has happened with GitHub.

Exactly, ones convenient choice undermines and erodes collective freedoms. In FOSS you 'vote' with your choices. In an analogy with politics this lack of consideration of freedoms and values, and applying of critical thinking may lead to freedom eventually being eradicated for good (or a very long time). In politics unfortunately we see people time and again voting democratically for their own oppression and lack of choice.

Yes Discord eventually won't be a good choice. Eventually. Then people will just move

People are talking about Discord like Freenode didn't crap on everyone recently

Meanwhile, sure, feel free to use an OSS solution then realize nobody cares

I was thinking of Freenode when I wrote that. The changeover process is using a different server - the client doesn't change and nor does the protocol. The switch from Discord will be a lot more disruptive. Everyone needs to find a new client and the protocol will be different. Ie, the entire ecosystem burns instead of one minor component like a DNS hostname.

And that is the upside of OSS. When Freenode caused people trouble they all just walked calmly to a new server. Case closed. Little of value was lost.

According to this logic FOSS projects should not support proprietary OSes like Windows or macOS.

It seems there are plenty that don’t - although that may also be for practical reasons.

But yes, I do think that free software ideals discourage supporting those platforms - however some may support them to give their users at least some freedom, eg when they are forced to use the platforms due to some work policy.

That's different. These OS'es are more bottom of the stack. Below that they run on proprietary firmware, even Linux.

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