this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Free and Open Source Software

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Idiomdrottning - FOSS is so dumb (idiomdrottning.org)
submitted 3 months ago by hellfire103@lemmy.ca to c/foss@beehaw.org
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Don't let the title fool you! This is not anti-FOSS!

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[–] jdnewmil@lemmy.ca 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Don't get me wrong... I am all for FOSS and I avoid walled gardens, but people have a hard time remembering to take the trash out to the street on the right day. Spending time driving garbage trucks monthly in the local waste management Co-op is not going to fly well. That problem gets solved using money... homeowners are taxed and the local government either hires garbagepeoples directly, or more often they hire a company that takes care of the problem.

Upshot there is money rather than co-op ownership, and frequently for-profit contractors win the day over government ownership. Contractors supply GaaS, we just have to get the bin to the street. So the equivalency here is the need for the public institution known as city government to retain ownership of the waste management system. Not quite "the people", since getting co-op volunteers is, well, erratic at best. And there are a ridiculous number of people out there who are vehemently against government management of actual organizations like this. I am for it, but over and over I see "privatization" win elections.

So I am not seeing how pitching this as "stupidly obvious" will win when "obvious" means hiring a contractor nearly every time.

[–] Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz 12 points 3 months ago

Coops aren't volunteers unless you are using the term in a way that doesn't mean worker cooperative.

[–] jherazob@beehaw.org 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, you're on Lemmy, one of a gazillion examples of this working

[–] jdnewmil@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 months ago

... and there are a gazillion examples where no community forms and the founder burns out. Cheers where it works, but some projects aren't sexy enough to attract a self-sustaining community, and when you don't preselect success stories but choose according to external needs that hit-and-miss experience starts to look less obvious and more like the thing only "smart" people can succeed at.

My objection is to the idea that FOSS is easy... it does require some smarts to succeed with.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Spending time driving garbage trucks monthly in the local waste management Co-op is not going to fly well.

Why not? I'm a member of a local co-op that does exactly that sort of thing. It's not actually garbage collection but close enough in every way in which it might be relevant here. Members (basically everyone who lives in the area and wants their trash collected) pay a fee. That goes to covering all costs, including hiring one direct employee for the one job (driving the truck) that can't be filled by volunteers (who handle management, accounting, et cetera.) There is no government bureaucracy involved except in setting basic regulations that the co-op legally needs to observe. No taxation is required. There are no profits. Nobody gets rich off of the arrangement. Anyone can opt out if they're capable of finding other alternatives, but nobody does because that would be crazy. The co-op has reliably done a good job for decades.

It's great. I suspect that replacing all municipal services (including e.g. "last mile" telecoms) with co-ops like this would make things better for everyone.

[–] jdnewmil@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I would say you are lucky. I lived in my college town for 20years and it started out chock full of co-ops in the 80s and by the time I moved away they were all hardly recognizable or gone. Food co-ops, housing co-ops, internet co-ops... all mutated away from shared labor or were replaced by sole ownerships.

My wife works for an employee-owned engineering company, but they are anything but FOSS in their culture.

I hope these intermediate management structures that combine expertise and collective ownership grow more. But it still isn't a slam-dunk that should be assumed to be the stupidly-obvious approach unless such organizations compete with the grifters... and then their success won't be due to the fact that they are using FOSS but that they present a track record of success as an organization.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 2 points 3 months ago

Sometimes I wonder what happened to all the food co-ops that used to be around, but since I'm in Canada it's probably just the same thing that happened to all the small independent grocers: They got squeezed out by the monopoly and monopsony power of the tight little cartel that now controls the whole market.

I'd say it's pretty obvious that other things being equal, it's generally better to run things cooperatively, just like it's stupidly obvious once you stop to think about it that free software is the right way to go. But it's not the only consideration, it's no guarantee of success, and the forces opposing it are strong.

[–] Imprint9816@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Author seems to ignore that FOSS projects tend to be much smaller teams without budget to create the user experience that private VC funded projects can.

Ths whole accountability argument seems to be pretty disingenuous, allowing anyone who wants to evaluate the source code is about as accountable as it gets.

The not-so-subtle "you will be lazy about what your doing if someone is not paying you not to be" vibe throughout this article is off putting to say the least.

I also find prioritizing user experience over the sharing of source code to be misguided. Allowing folks to gate keep knowledge and hide what they are doing is a big price just for a better user experience.

The real issue with FOSS is the same as with P2P networks. Most people are leechers whose only contribution is lip service.

[–] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I... these are all good points, but... did we read the same article?

Article seems to ignore that FOSS projects tend not to have the budget to create the UX that VC-funded projects can. ... I find prioritizing UX over sharing of source code to be misguided.

The author specifically calls attention to this exact point:

If a weirdo guy moved into your kitchen and blocked you from grabbing a spoon whenever you wanted and instead rented them out to you provided you only ate the gruel he provided, the people who would be most able to see the absurdity in that would be be the people who remember what it was like before. Those who grew up with that system would be “whaddayamean? This is super convienient. I just stick my hand in the kitchen and a spoonful of gruel is shoved into it. Like it, love it, want more of it”. They’d be like “people who don’t have a spoon guy are so gross and so dumb. What the heck are they even? Doing rifling through their own cutlery drawer like some sorta eggheads”.

[–] Imprint9816@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Honestly i found that whole excerpt to be pretty nonsensical.

Don't see how that relates to what i said and then you quoted but reworded (why?). Plus it all just circles back into "its bad cause the UX is slightly more inconvenient".

If the author had any substance to his argument it wouldn't require laying out a ridiculous scenario just to get the reader to understand what in hell he is trying to say.

He basically tldrs the whole article a few sentences later with " I want it to be easy to use." The author never seriously considers if that's worth the cost.

[–] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I think they addressed that point pretty clearly. The author says that just because the user experience of sticking your hand into your kitchen and instantly receiving food is fantastic, doesn't mean that letting someone you don't know live in your kitchen and only eating what they decide to make you is a good solution, especially since it means you couldn't use your kitchen (which I believe is a metaphor for your smartphone) for anything else even if you wanted to. Further, those who believe it's a good solution because it is free and its user experience is good only believe this because they have never known anything else. The author also explicitly states

So that’s the dialectic here. I want people to not have to know about tech stuff. I’m not into the tech-for-tech’s-sake lifestyle. I want it to be easy to use. You just tell the computer what you want and it happens, no need to point and click, let alone configure and make. That’d be great. And hackers and modders could add features and share them and everyone would benefit.

But it’s got to be free, free for reals. Open source, and either decentralized or democratically governed.

The author, I think, is saying that while user experience is a nice goal to pursue, it means nothing if it isn't open source, and you can't go around the carefully-crafted VC-funded fancy-but-restrictive UX if you have the skills to do so. Perhaps it is a reach to say that the author prioritizes open source over good user experience, but I don't think so, and even from the most pessimistic reading of those two paragraphs the author views them as at least equal.

you quoted but reworded (why?).

I quoted and reworded it because I was on mobile and couldn't copy paste from your comment without a lot of hassle, and didn't want to retype everything you had typed word for word. Didn't mean anything by it.

[–] Samsy@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago

Okay, now I want a spoon guy in my kitchen.