Piestar

So in an effort to not suck, Gimp has gone single window!

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/08/23/1355225/The-GIMP-Now-Has-a-Working-Single-Window-Mode

Cue the hundreds of posts about how this is a terrible thing.  But here’s what confuses me, look at the image on the right compared to my newly Photoshopped screenshot.  Notice anything?  It almost seems like (on OSX at least) Photoshop isn’t even single window.

The reason nobody uses Gimp and the reason it sucks is simply because it has no compelling features that make it worth using.  It’s that simple.  But no, instead we just get pages and pages and pages and pages of people who know nothing about graphics, design or even Photoshop talking authoritatively as if their opinions somehow matter.

Gimp has exactly the same problem Linux has, only significantly worse.  The only people that use it are the tiny fraction of the available markeshare who ignore and belittle majority who largely just want to get stuff done.  It fails to provide anything compelling that could make it useful except for a the very occasional rare use case but most of all the ‘promotion’ for it largely involves the argument ‘We are going to talk crap about our competition for a few hundred posts so you’ll think we suck less by comparison’.

Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone try to promote it on it’s own merits without trying to tear down Photoshop or Windows instead.  Tell me why it’s compelling.  Tell me how it can make my life easier.  Chances are if nobody uses it it’s not a conspiracy, it’s simply because it’s not very good.

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As Sun Tzu said…

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

FOSS advocates need to learn to make an honest appraisal of themselves and their enemies.  Sitting at sub 1% marketshare with no increasing trend while declaring everyone else inferior is the very definition of hubris.

Sure large companies are like an oil tanker in that they take a long, long time to turn while FOSS is (allegedly) agile and maneuverable.  However MS has had over a decade to turn the oil tanker, and Apple apparently bought a speedboat.  What is frequently forgotten about the analogy is that it is a significant task to stop an oil tanker once it has turned.

Any FOSS advocates want to make an honest assessment as to why Windows 7 managed to get a larger marketshare than Linux before it was even released? Surely the very people who installed W7 in beta form are exactly the sort of people who can (and would) install Linux, not to mention the lack of Live CD’s etc.  Yet Linux has had nearly 2 decades while W7 had around 6 months.

Has anyone ever done any form of survey into why people who tried Linux ended up not using it?  I simply fail to believe that more people installed the W7 beta than have tried Linux.

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It’s the freedom that counts, not the free, if you have ever listened to a FOSS advocate.  Yet the FOSS movement is still obsessed with taking out Microsoft despite their ‘crimes’ being relatively trivial by today’s standards and largely all in the past anyhow.  Outside the arena of your desktop OS and office package that few today actually really need they are almost irrelevant.  Switch to Mac or even Linux if you fancy it and you can have nothing more to do with MS.  Easy.  Mission accomplished surely?

It’s almost cult like.  My theory is the tech crowd that dominates the FOSS ecosystem consists largely of people that want to be seen as being knowledgeable, rather than actually knowledgeable.  The ‘hate Microsoft lol MS Bob’ routine has been handed down from pretender to pretender with the original person who made up their own mind on the subject long since gone.  It’s easy to do, gets you geek cred and you really don’t have to worry about accuracy as nobody is really going to be against you.  You end up with all of the vitriol but none of the understanding or context.  They completely fail to understand who is being evil now as they simply lack the ability to form an idea for themselves.

Just look at how the GPL has been subverted by the client-server model.  You are never technically in possession of the software – only the output – so it is apparently exempt from any distribution clauses your license may have.  BSD, GPL, doesn’t matter – you can’t get the code.  The only one that apparently solves this issue is the AGPL and nobody ever seems to use it.  The valued ‘freedoms’ are almost entirely gone with the client-server approach.  Want the code to the modifications I have made on this site?  Tough.  As an end user you still have no rights to the code nor the modifications made.  Yet there seems to be little to no attention made to this fact despite the large focus on ‘freedom’.  Surely putting two computers in a box with a VNC setup is enough to defeat the GPL entirely given these circumstances?  It’s certainly massively against the spirit of the thing but is this ever even discussed?  Or is it just GPL, praise, praise, when the actual license is irrelevant?

Ubisoft are obsessed with always-on DRM for single player games (it requires a constant net connection to play) and everyone who knows about it is rightfully outraged – after all how long will these servers be up?  However the same goes for Google Apps and other thin-client software.  People, largely FOSS advocates, are cheering from the sidelines as they trade a non-free chunk of binary code that they can store locally and use forever for a web based version which they require net access to use, may be discontinued at any time and keeps all documents on a computer you have zero control over.

Sure webapps/mobile/newtech may kill Microsoft, which seems to be the cause of the cheering, but the replacement is an order of magnitude worse.  But how are you meant to try to look clever on Slashdot if you have to actually understand technology, history and context?

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