1 Oct
2014
1 Oct
'14
1:20 p.m.
On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Florian Paul Schmidt <mista.tapas(a)gmx.net>
wrote:
The important point was though that left to their own devices the
non-enthusiasts will be slaughtered by the software they use and maybe
we have a responsibility to protect them from themselves.
"slaughter" is perhaps a strong term.
perhaps a more nuanced description might run something like this (taking a
little inspiration from the video):
creating and maintaining **consumer** software with a very good user
experience is expensive (relative to other tasks that people do) and takes
a significant amount of time. therefore the creation and maintainance of
this sort of software requires resources that are not clearly available to
most open source efforts. the proprietary software that manages to do this
is influenced at some level by where its creators and maintainers get their
income from, and the development of the "free" model used in particular by
google points in a direction where the software must allow/empower/enable
behaviour by the software developers that are not in the users' best
interest (e.g. selling data about the users).