Piestar

I bet if you looked in the standard Linux advocates dictionary you’d be hard pressed to find the word ‘easy’.  It’s probably cowering somewhere among the Z’s, hoping that the the torture will stop.

What am I referring to?  Comments such as this (or Google your own) …

Maybe if it wasn’t so easy to change it would matter a little but now it’s starting to sound like a bunch of spoiled babies crying because mommy didn’t cut the crust off of their sandwich. Get over it people…

In the above example the zealot is saying how you shouldn’t complain about a usability regression because it’s so easy to change back.  Here’s what people are referring to as easy:

It is easy to change back to the traditional top RHS.
Alt +F2 to open launcher
gconf-editor
select: apps/metacity/general/button_layout
Place ‘spacer, after ‘menu:’
menu:spacer,maximize,minimize,close

It’s almost as if you say something is easy enough times it’ll suddenly be easier – such as ‘updating is easy, just type sudo apt-get dist-upgrade’ – ignoring the fact that words have actual meanings, and changing the meaning to make something seem better than it is is dishonest.  Here’s the dictionary definition of ‘easy’:

Easy: achieved without great effort; presenting few difficulties : an easy way of

Of course when you actually bring up the fact that it’s not easy you’ll get this fun little qualifier added ‘It’s easy when you know how‘.  But as far as all the dictionaries I have checked none have ‘when you know how’ anywhere in the description.  And why not?  Because ‘when you know’ negates the whole meaning of ‘easy’.  Here’s a bunch of other things that are ‘easy when you know how’.

• C Pointers
• Regular Expressions
• Mod Rewrite
• Juggling
• Professional Snooker
• Tightrope Walking
• Multidimensional Arrays
• Assembly Language
• Windows Arabic Edition (it’s easy once you learn Arabic)

You see where I am going with this.  In fact I can’t think of a single thing that isn’t ‘easy once you know how’.  Even the deliberately obfuscated languages such as Brainfuck are probably fairly simple once you get to know it well enough.

CLI vs GUI

Think of a GUI as a complex network of roads and paths.  You have all the paths in front of you and can see the main highways (start button) and little hidden side-roads (control panel) but although they are sometimes twisty and poorly signposted it is possible to get from A to B without a map.  Not that a map wouldn’t help, and not that the signs can’t be better, but getting from A to B does not require one.

The CLI on the other hand is like the same network of roads, but instead of having signposts you have a blindfold.  You need to know exactly what road you need, where it is and how to get down it.  One mistake and you are lying in the ditch.  It’s the whole point of a GUI and why they have been so wildly successful – they make things easy.

I remember telling a veteran Linux user about tail -f to monitor updates on a log file.  It’s not because he was stupid, it’s because he had never ever read the particular bit of documentation that described this feature.  That is, to effectively use a CLI based interface you must have already read and remembered everything about it.

If we take the above example as a GUI then the program will often pop up a message ‘changes detected, do you want to update to the file stored on disk’, with Yes, No and Always as an option.  There’s no way you could not know about it.  Same thing with mounting volumes, I’ve used various GUI partition tools for the last 20 years and the only thing I need to know going in was what I wanted.  I used the Linux mount command for the first time and wasted the best part of an hour due to not knowing to add ‘-umask=0666′ to the command to make it user-readable.  If that was a GUI there would have been an ‘allow user access’ checkbox and the problem would not have existed.

If something requires a mass amount of prerequisite knowledge then it is not easy!  If there is no way of knowing that something is even possible, let possible to figure out yourself then it is not easy!  Just because once you have invested the months of practice into learning whatever you happen to be using (Bash, VI, Emacs, Perl, etc) you can do something in 5 seconds does not make it easy!  If you have to copy line by line from the internet into a terminal window with no idea what you are typing means, it is not easy!

Hell, I am at the bottom of this article and I simply can’t remember what the steps were that were outlined as ‘easy’ – so if something can be written and read multiple times and you still can’t remember how to do it, it’s not easy.

Update: That’s not to say you don’t get some terrible GUI apps – you do.  But the natural state of a well made GUI app is to be intuitive, obvious and easy.  A CLI apps natural state is to have a mandatory RTFM requirement.

78 comments

I swear if I had a penny for every time I saw a css file contain something like the following I would have a lot of pennies:

body {
background-image: url(/image/background.jpg);
}

I mean seriously, I swear the majority of the time the only thing in most peoples CSS folder is ‘styles.css’.  Why even bother?

The point of CSS is to seperate style from structure.  An accreditation logo, a staff photo, a company logo are content.  The 8 separate images that make up the corners of a styled box are not.

If your imagery is content, use the <img> tag and put it in /images/ – that’s what it is for.  If you want to style a box border, background or anything else that is non-essential content place it in /css/ along with styles.css and do the following:

body {
background-image: url(background.jpg);
}

It’s out of the way of the actual content images and if you want to change the design at a later point you just switch the content of /css/.  If you want to be fancy it’s trivial to do /css/day/ and /css/night/ and have seperate stylesheets for night/day.  If you decided to store everything in ../images/ then doing any of the above would be a real hassle.

*End PSA*

34 comments

Edit: To get a better perspective of the goings on in the Ubuntu world at the moment have a glance at this post, which is a good summary.

The new Ubuntu is shaping up to look a bit too much like OSX isn’t it?  They just need to add a dock and they are there.  But just because they have aped the look of OSX doesn’t actually mean anything in terms of usability.

“Cargo cult activity in the Pacific region increased significantly during and immediately after World War II, when large amounts of manpower and materials were brought in by the Japanese and American combatants, and this was observed by the residents of these regions. When the war ended, the military bases were closed and the flow of goods and materials ceased. In an attempt to attract further deliveries of goods, followers of the cults engaged in ritualistic practices such as building crude imitation landing strips, aircraft and radio equipment, and mimicking the behaviour that they had observed of the military personnel operating them.” – Cargo Cults, Wikipedia

The thing is I am typing this on a Mac and I can quite categorically say that Gnome behaves nothing like OSX.

OSX has an application based system, Windows has a window based system.  In OSX an application is not required to stay within its main window – it has no main window.  Rather than having the file menu in the application itself it is placed at the top of the screen and changes depending on which application is active, and an application doesn’t have to have any windows open to be running, or active.  It’s based around the idea that the user does one task at a time and while I am still not sure if I like it, I can respect it.

Ubuntu on the other hand, while mimicking OSX perfectly with the top menu still has a window based approach to applications.  Where in OSX the top menu is the unified file menu on Ubuntu it’s simply the start button at the top.  If you were to remove the cruft, put it to the bottom and place the task list in the middle you’d have the Windows 95 layout in everything but name.  You couldn’t do this to OSX – it simply wouldn’t work as it is actually different, rather than cosmetically different.

Harking back to the movement of the window controls from the right side to the left side* we have yet to hear a decent reason for the change coming from anyone inside Canonical.  Usability wise it’s a bad move, there is no reason for it except, along with the colours, themes and icons it mimicks OSX.  Shuttleworth’s main argument against the complainers is:

“And the major argument against it appears solely to be “we’re used to it here”, which is important, but not overriding.”

Which isn’t true, as there are a deluge of reasons why it is a bad idea (namely Linux isn’t OSX) and more importantly there are no good arguments for it.  It simply appears to be copying OSX as that’s what the designers he has appear to be using (so much for dogfooding).

The logic for the change seems to be ‘Apple is concerned with usability’, ‘Apple has the window decorations on the left’, ‘lets put the window decorations on the left’.  The question of why never seems to come up.  Has anyone actually  seen anybody from Canonical actually give a decent reason for this change other than ‘OSX does it that way’?

It’s like the dual-start-bar-approach.  As on OSX the file menu is removed from the main program window and placed at the top of the screen you don’t really lose any screen space on height.  The controls placed on the top right of the screen are just using an already unused area.  On Ubuntu you do lose height as you already have a file menu in each window already – essentially you take a full vertical bar to make a large start button.  Add in the task bar at the bottom and you waste 3x the space of OSX while looking the same.  This is also the reason the window decorations don’t make a real difference** on OSX, but with the new Ubuntu layout the chances of missing the Edit dropdown and hitting close are pretty high.

It’s abundantly clear to anyone who even has a basic grasp of the subject that the Ubuntu team have no real vision for the desktop.  They don’t appear to have an idea of how it should work, or how they want it to work.  They just appear to be copying random elements from other OS’s with no real appreciation of the ‘big picture’.  Essentially they are missing out on the context of others decisions in the hope that they ape in a cargo-cult-esque way aspects from successful operating systems that they themselves will be successful.

But like the cargo cults of the pacific making a replica landing strip and control tower will not magically make planes appear.

Ubuntu is not a Democracy

I’ve seen Ubuntu (And Linux in general) referred to as a Meritocracy many times, that is those that do things can make the decisions.  Which is fine, scratch your own itch and all that – you are working for free, ignore who you want.  The fun side effect of this though is everyone who isn’t a programmer – that is, the artists, UI designers, normal users – are effectively ignored.

Can you imagine the ‘meritocracy’ argument applied to anything else?  Architecture?  War?  Film?  ‘I, the builder, the tank driver, the fighter pilot, will do what I want as I have the tools and I do the work’.  The whole FOSS movement essentially marginalizes the skills of anyone who isn’t a programmer (or rich).

Basic lip-service is paid to the non-developer but there are pretty much no actual procedures or mechanisms in place to actually listen to people.  Even things like bug reporting is outside the scope of most users.  Common businesses adopt the three tier tech support approach – normal users talk to tier 1 staff who decide if it’s a bug, recurring problem, suggestion etc who either file it (bugzilla), log it (user has problems doing x), or if it’s a serious issue or a good idea kick it up to tier 2 who then gather more data and submit it as a proposal to tier 3 (who actually do the work).  Even though the bulk of complaints to tier 1 will be nonsense they will provide valuable data by aggregate – 14% of all complaints were to do with x, thus redesigning x will reduce complaints by about 14%.   You could glance at the support summary to find out what you need to work on.  There may be very little on what is actually wrong, but you know for sure there is a problem.

What methods are in place in Ubuntu to listen to the public?  How are they getting a feel for how their users like the OS?  The problems they are having?  The features that they want?  They say they don’t need to actually listen to the community as the developers are the community, then they say it’s a meritocracy and if you want something you need to code it yourself.  I have never worked for a company that cares as little about the opinions of users as your standard Linux distro – in the ‘real world’ if a customer complains you have no choice but to listen***.  Whatever way you cut it the claims of ‘community developed’ are a load of crap, no software company has less respect for their users than ‘free software’.

The issue is it is a democracy, just as Windows is a democracy.  If people don’t like Windows (Vista, ME) they’ll say so, vote with their wallets and Microsoft will have no choice but to address their concerns or risk going out of business.  Obviously Ubuntu is free and funded by a multi-millionaire at a loss, but the principle is the same.

Do what you want, piss off your customer base, after all it’s your ball and you can go home if you want to but you simply cannot present the “it’s not a democracy/it’s a meritocracy” argument if you ever hope to have a significant (and increasing) market share.  The two things are simply mutually exclusive – so make your mind up.  Do you want marketshare, or a personal plaything?

As many people pointed out, you are free to fork Ubuntu and make the changes you’d want.  But you are also free to use Windows or OSX where the companies producing them actually have a financial interest (thus motivation) in keeping you happy.  And I know for a fact that Windows and Apple actually care about and take note of the issues that their users have.

* Another apparent problem is the position of the ‘close’ button moves depending on if the window has minimize or maximize buttons, since it is to the right of them

** People generally drag windows out the left side of the screen if they need more space to expose the scrollbars, the downside is they lose the window controls – not a problem if they are on the RHS.

*** Company quality varies, but you can bet that when a commercial company is busy banning people and deleting posts (and denying the problem) in the background it is furiously working on a resolution.

50 comments

It’s got to the point where it’s almost not worth the hassle of even mentioning when Ubuntu decides they are doing a new theme and/or rebrand, as every 6 months like clockwork they announce they are ‘rethinking the UI paradigm’ or some such nonsense, then trot out the same rubbish again.

Anyway here’s the desktop from this announcement, and guess what?  It’s exactly the same and still has all the problems it’s always had.  What progress!

Apparently the latest innovation is to remove any method of viewing running programs.  Check the screenshots – where did the taskbar go to?  I also like the consistancy of moving the close buttons to the left, but keeping the orientation the same as Windows, so no matter if you are a convert from OSX or Windows you will still be confused.  Nothing quite like change for changes sake.

Just the usual ‘cargo cult usability’ we’ve come to expect and love from the FOSS brigade – tries to look like a Mac, works like Windows – nothing to see here, lets wait for the announcement 6 months from now about how they are ‘rethinking the UI paradigm’.  I am sure they’ll get it right that time.

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So, after months of chasing Microsoft for my ‘shill cheque’, that all the FOSS advocates assure me that I will be getting, I have decided to become a ‘switcher’ and get a MacBook Air.

*dodges thrown rotten fruit*

Actually I want to punch anyone that uses the term ‘switcher’ in the face – why do you have to choose a platform anyhow?  I didn’t ‘switch’ to pizza, I just eat it sometimes.  Anyway my reasons…

• It’s half the weight of a normal laptop.
• It looks sweet.
• SSD – Most wait time on computers is for disk IO these days.
• I’m not paying for it myself.
• I want to look like a pretentious cock cool.

Hopefully Apple will be more prompt getting my shill check out to me, or I’ll put Windows 7 on it.  I may just put W7 on it anyway just to annoy the Mac faithful.  But only once my cheque has cleared.

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I have to say that I consider myself to be a scientist, if not in the traditional beakers-and-chemicals sense then in the more philosophical sense.  I believe in the scientific method.

I don’t really get the rising anti-science movement these days.  I think it is generally a result of a failing education system (caused through a lack of respect by the parents and pupils rather than the school themselves failings) but you more and more hear science being referred to as something optional.  Even people who you would otherwise think of as smart seem to think mysticism and ‘healing crystals’ and other such nonsense can co-exist with science, missing the fundamental point – If there was any tangible proof you could cure people with crystals it would be science.  Since no proof exists it isn’t science.  And since no proof exists how on earth does anyone know that they work?  Even if you prove me wrong and manage to prove in the healing power of crystals then you have just brought them under the umbrella of ‘science’ and your whole point is moot.

There is a popular saying (coined by Marcello Truzzi) which is “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”  Basically if you claim you can cure cancer with crystals, can read minds, have a perpetual motion machine or any other large, game-changing, claim then you better be able to back it up with some pretty hefty evidence.  Every now and then someone will trot out some perpetual motion machine which they claim ‘works’, but mysteriously never works on the night, or only works under limited, unverifiable conditions.  I always call bullshit and the reason for this (and the original quote) is the burden of proof is on the person making such claims.  I claim I can fly, why is it up to you to disprove this?

So apparently commercial software is obsolete.  FOSS is the way of the future.  The old barter model – I give you x in exchange for y – is dead, to be replaced by a model of free distribution and sharing.  An industry that accounts for trillions of pounds and millions of jobs globally is on the verge of being wiped out and replaced by a community sharing model.

The old system of selling software for money is obsolete.  Instead the new system is to not only give that software away but to give away the source, plus complete distribution rights.  You can in fact make more money by giving away software and selling support than you can ever make selling said software.

The capitalist system of competition to drive down costs and to create the best product through competition is dead, instead teams of people working in their spare time (for free) will create software that caters for the end-users needs much more completely and capably than groups of people who’s livelihoods depend on keeping such users happy.

There are some pretty extraordinary claims above, yet the presented evidence of Linux (which nobody uses), Sun Microsystems (which just failed), Microsoft and Apple (kings of closed and doing well) with the only real evidence of success being Ubuntu (funded by a multi-millionaire) and Red Hat (who’s yearly turnover is probably less than Microsoft’s annual stationary budget) do not point to the claims being true.

Where’s the ‘extraordinary evidence’ required to back up such claims?  Where’s the normal evidence?  How can anyone make such claims and expect to be taken seriously by sensible people?

Believe this rubbish, sure, but don’t pretend it’s any more real or believable than healing crystals, homeopathy or ‘faith healing’, because it isn’t.  I just looked in my crystal ball and saw that in ten years time FOSS will be just as unpopular then as it is now.

38 comments

All those people wanting me to actually put something on my About page (as well as contact details) have had their wishes fulfilled!

Also, over on Slashdot right now there is some amusing idiocy about Microsoft apparently corrupting the legislative process, buying governments etc. because it is trying to get a law changed in its favour.  Normally I wouldn’t be in favour of this behaviour but here is the law:

Under current law, all of Microsoft’s worldwide licensing revenues of approximately $20.7 billion annually are taxable at .484 percent.

Yep, that’s right, Washington State want nearly 0.5% of Microsoft’s total revenue.  Not profit, revenue.  That’s 0.5% of global revenue.

What if each American State decided it wanted a piece of this action – it’s only fair after all.  That would mean near 25% of Microsoft’s revenue would suddenly dissappear overnight.  Since there are what (~250 ish) countries in the world – lets be fair they deserve the right to the tax just as much as WS – that is 145% of revenue Microsoft would have to pay in ‘taxes’.

What Microsoft want is to pay taxes on what they sell in the state, not in the whole world, which to me seems perfectly reasonable.  But who am I to get in the way of a groundless bash-fest by the idiots on Slashdot?

Edit: I am an idiot, Redmond is in Washington.  They still should not be able to tax items sold in a different country simply because MS has a presence there.

30 comments

I am sure everyone by now has heard the phrase “The customer is always right” at some point in their lives.  The actual meaning though gets lost in translation a lot of the time and it is often taken to mean “The customer is allowed to be a dick” – which they aren’t*.  What it actually means is, “The customers opinion is always valid”.

The point of this is to try to keep your customers happy, and to listen to their concerns.  If a customer is not happy with something about your service or product no decent business would just tell them to ‘piss off’, instead they would try their best to address the customers concern and to try to prevent such occurances in the future.  For example if you sold a spade which the handle kept coming off you’d either replace the item or refund the customers money and, but more importantly, you’d try to identify the cause of the problem.

While often customer complaints are a one-off and usually end there, what is important is to keep a lookout for repeated complaints as they indicate a systemic problem.  For example in a restaurant if a certain dish gets sent back regularly you wouldn’t say that the customers have no taste, instead you’d look into what is in it and how it is made in an attempt to solve the issue entirely.

Customers vs FOSS

Take this blog from Preston Gralla for example.  He says that installing software that is not in the repo’s is too difficult and is holding back Linux adoption.  Not a new statement in the slightest, and one that I both agree with and am sure I have even said before.

It’s not even like he’s being an angry shouter like a lot of us embittered haters have become, he’s clearly following the ‘make every second paragraph praise’ approach which is required (as an offering to the Holy GNU) when writing any article that dares be critical of Linux.  Not that it helped him at all anyway.

He is a ‘customer’ of Ubuntu, just as I am and just as thousands of other people who no doubt share the same view are.  And while many people are about to say something pithy like “Linx doesn’t want you”, may I remind you of Ubuntu Bug #1 – Microsoft has majority marketshare – implying that Ubuntu actually wants customers.

Yet this guy says something that, to him, is an impediment to him using Ubuntu and immediately gets his head bitten off by a horde of angry Linux users who then post massive amounts of comments saying how he is wrong, calling him a shill, claiming he’s getting paid by MS, claiming that the site is fundamentally biased (despite it being home to the infamous SJVN) and generally denying that the problem he outlines could possibly exist, and it’s only because he’s either stupid, or being paid that he can come to such a conclusion.

The following two questions then get raised: Will this torrent of abuse somehow make him change his mind about his claim and realise that the problem he has suddenly isn’t a problem anymore?  And more importantly will he be more disposed to trying and promoting Linux after recieving those responses than before?

Or consider if you went into a bar and ordered a drink, and the drink tasted like cleaning fluid (or otherwise nasty) and you pointed this out to the bartender.  If he (and the other patrons) proceeded to call you an idiot moron you would simply not ever go back and tell all your friends about the bad experience (welcome to my blog!) rather than go ‘you’re right I am a moron’.

The customers complaints are always valid.  Calling them a moron and denying they have a complaint does solve the problem – you no longer have them as a customer.

Installing Software In Linux Sucks

Besides, he’s right.  It’s amusing that the community that touts ‘choice’ as it’s primary selling point presents the argument that he should just wait until the distro updates the repository, rather than be able to easily use new software straight off the bat.

When I was trying Linux I had endless issues with the software in the repo’s being massively out of date, and what do you expect?  You have tens of thousands of apps to track and keep up to date and it’s not even like the iPhone or Android app stores in that developers don’t necessarily submit new versions requiring the repo maintainers to find out when there has been an update (good luck with that).

In an ideal world the repo’s would be all you need (and communism would actually work) but in reality the system of repositorys needs to be supplemented by a system of manual installation in the cases where the software is out of date or simply unavailable.  And the brutal truth is Linux falls flat on it’s face here.

Manual Installation

Welcome to the quagmire that is manual software installation in Linux.  As soon as you’re outside the walled garden of vendor approved obsolete versions of software to be found in the repositories then you’re largely out of luck.

How often have you seen Microsoft being berated for making it’s own ‘standards’ for things like word documents and protocols?  How many Linux evangelists have you seem complain that .docx and .doc are not compatible?  Yet these very same evangelists will argue ’till they are blue in the face that somehow multiple incompatible package formats and standard breaking distros is somehow a ‘good thing’ – usually under the guise of ‘choice’.

Hell, I’ve even written a post bashing the Windows software installation method and since this is technically an anti-Linux (and thus visited largely by Windows users) blog I should be getting angry posts saying how I am wrong, and an idiot, yet all I got was agreements and clarifications!  Yet if you say something as BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS as Linux needs a standardized package format you’ll get flamed to a crisp.

The Dead Parrot Horse

I am flogging a dead horse with my point but I think it deserves to be made (and flogged).  Being critical of Linux always reminds me of the Dead Parrot Sketch.  The community is largely unable to accept any** criticism as valid, no matter how obvious or problematic, with the first approach to user complaints to be to deny they exist, then to call the complainer an idiot troll.

This is what is holding Linux back from going mainstream – it’s the fact that the community simply doesn’t care about the needs or issues of the people they are trying to foist Linux upon.

The claims of ‘community development’ are a massive lie in that aside from posting the occasional bug reports (which you can do with closed source) anyone with a problem is abused and faces North Korean levels of censorship***.  You either take what the Linux cult gives you and be quiet, or you simply don’t use it.  Trying to contribute improvements and suggestions just gets you into trouble.

If you’re happy with Linux, sure use it.  If you’re not don’t even bother – it’s simply not worth it.

* Not if I am working there they aren’t

** I think one of the sources of my Ubuntuforums ban was due to an argument where I was trying to propose double clickable .deb files.

*** Preston, try to have the discussion on your blog post on a Linux forum (Ubuntuforums is a good choice) and see how fast the admins delete your post then ban you.

99 comments

Everyone’s favorite troll got me thinking again about the GPL and it’s claims of freedom and I think I have worked out another thing that makes me so uneasy about it.

Of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with distributing something under the GPL.  If you are committed to freedom then you’ll accept that people should have the freedom to use whatever license they please.  What is problematic is the popular view that somehow releasing your software under the GPL is somehow ‘ethical’, with some people even suggesting it should be a legal requirement for all software.

If you believe the revisionists they would tell you that ‘free’ is the natural state of software until companies (mainly Microsoft) came in and ruined everything by ‘closing’ the software and charging money, snatching software utopia out of the worlds hands in the process.

But the problem is this: Why is software the only thing covered by these fundamental freedoms?

Books, Software, Movies and Music are all technically the same thing, they are an infinitely reproducible product based upon human endeavour, differing from standard creations (such as making a chair) in that making 1,000,000 is almost as easy as making 10.  Only the first one took the time to make.

The ‘rights’ outlined in the GPL are not just the right to the source code – that is tangential to the issue.  The main ‘rights’ are for free modification and redistribution – If I receive any GPL’d software I am free to edit it and give it away for no cost.  The claims that ‘you can sell GPL’d software’ as a counter to a claim that it creates an unworkable business model are intellectually dishonest since you can only sell it once – after that you’ll be competing with free.

If I were to buy a new book by Iain Banks, should I have the right to edit, make copies and then give those copies away?  Should I demand the original document rather than the printed version as by not being able to do the above easily with a physical book my ‘freedoms’ are being compromised?  If I was to make this argument to most people who support the GPL as a vehicle for software progress I would be laughed at, but it is fundamentally the same thing.

The argument could be made that books are for entertainment, but education largely comes in book form.  Also there are no clear cut lines between media anymore.  If I draw a sapceship on paper, do you have the ‘freedom’ to take it and give it away?  What about if I make a 3D rendering of it?  What if I make the 3D rendering display as a runtime exe?  What if I make it interactive and flyable?  At what point do your ‘fundamental rights’ kick in and allow you to do whatever you want with it?

The belief is that if the GPL was enforced today then the world would be better off, and while true this fails to consider the future.  If these ‘freedoms’ applied to the world of literature then there would be a wealth of works suddenly made available for low or zero cost.  What would then happen though is the individuals who before were creating a livelihood on the sales of their creation would suddenly have no income and be forced to find other avenues for money and while some may be able to monetize their fame most others would not.  As a result you would get people like Stephen King working as shelf stackers in supermarkets rather than doing what they do well and sure, he can write in the evenings and weekends but he would only write a fraction of what he could under the previous system.

The ‘freedom’ model essentially pulls the rug out from under the system of rewarding artists that has worked for hundreds of years.  People claim that you can ‘sell support’ and that it is just as profitable, but that is blatantly not true in many cases – only certain software can be made profitable.

I want a system where individuals with talent are able to do nothing but exercise that talent, rather than a system where they have to work mundane jobs to simply make a living and are only allowed to create greatness in the evenings and weekends.

45 comments

Around 17% of all traffic that reaches this blog is on the keyword ‘Gimp Sucks’.  Just throwing that out there.

I love the self delusion of the Gimp developers.  Look at their site under ‘contribute’:

“GIMP is Free Software and a part of the GNU Project. In the free software world, there is generally no distinction between users and developers. As in a friendly neighbourhood, everybody pitches in to help their neighbors. Please consider the time you give in assistance to others as payment.”

I’ve always thought there was a massive distinction between artists and developers.  I think what they meant to say is ‘unless you are a programmer we won’t listen to you or cater to your needs’.

Here’s a conversation I have over and over again:

Linux Zealot: You should use Linux, Windows sucks and is for morons.
Me: I need stuff which you don’t get on Linux like Photoshop
Linux Zealot: Use Gimp, it’s better than Photoshop plus it’s free!
Me: Gimp sucks, (insert pages of things that it can’t do here)
Linux Zealot: If you don’t like it don’t use it, stop complaining it’s free!

So to the people pushing Linux (and Gimp) onto users, you have two choices:

1. Shut up and stop promoting it (and calling people idiots for not using it) or…
2. Cater for the needs and desires of your userbase and own up to and address the flaws.

You can’t claim it’s better as well as telling people to not complain as it’s free.  As soon as you say it’s better and evangelise on this basis and it’s not actually better it just makes you a liar.  And if you evangelise on the basis that it’s better and people say it isn’t then their opinions are valid and should be listened to.  Also, telling people to ‘fix it yourself’ does not count.

As soon as you tell them they are, in fact, wrong and it is better* – as the Gimp** supporters love to do – then you have crossed the boundary between lies and self delusion.  Enjor your stay, the Ubuntuforums are first on the left.

* The usual excuse is ‘you are thinking in the ‘Microsoft’ way.  If you’d tried Emacs/VI/Latex before Word you’d find it just as easy’.  Or just plain old WorksForMe(tm).

** Oh, and the name is still embarassing, offensive and exclusionary.

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