21 Dec
2010
21 Dec
'10
7:57 p.m.
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:05:18AM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Philipp ?berbacher
<hollunder(a)lavabit.com> wrote:
This is exactly the problem, and it is very fundamental.
Developers can't control the user experience of an open source software package. Full
stop. It is not possible. The users, and the distributions, have a lot more say in it.
Unless you close the source, users on Linux *WILL* have varying uncontrollable levels of
user experience-- it's the price of openness.
I see that Ardour has a good following of users in the Mac world, where this kind of tight
control of the user experience is rampant and was part of Steve Jobs's original
closed-system vision in the early 1980s, and perhaps that kind of philosophy is important
when dealing with that market. But that attitude doesn't fit in Linux land, although
shipping a binary distro-independent package might get somewhere close, who knows.
-ken
I spare myself criticism regarding cooperation in
the past and the
increasing tendency to control, but one more thing to think about:
'advertising' A3 features on the one hand and trying to preventing
'casual' users is contradictory.
to be pedantic, i've taken precisely zero steps to prevent packages
being created, unless you think that me actually speaking out about it
can prevent it. i'm a reasonably good software architect, but i'm not
that powerful :)
my concern is not really for me or other developers, its for users who
get a crappy experience and conclude that a tool that *will*
eventually be useful for them is too buggy for any serious user. i
can't count the pieces of s/w that i've downloaded, found that it
crashes or had a serious bug and simply written it off. at some points
during a program's lifetime, that might be an appropriate reaction.
but before there has even been an alpha release, i don't think its
fair to users to suggest to them that there is an easy or "casual" way
to "try" the program when it is reasonably likely that it doesn't work
for them.
the alternative is for us to do development in secret and i don't
think that this really serves anyone very well.