Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Capitalism does not provide a fair playing field here, as the marketplace has extraordinary inertia. If you want to use almost any commercial software, you need to fully jump into the commercial software arena and buy a commercial operating system to run it. (Of course there are exceptions, but they are few.) You might like the aesthetics of OS X, but tons of people are obviously willing to use a commercial OS with the aesthetics of a Ford Pinto, so that isn’t the major reason people use a non-free desktop—it is because the applications they are used to still require it.
And there is another inertia at play here which has also been nurtured by corporations, and that is that what passes as computer “literacy” is the opposite of literacy; it is dependence on dumbed-down user interfaces that reduce users to a point-and-grunt level of expressive capability. The open-source world is still based on a vision on users and developers not being entirely separate categories, and while this is not the world we live in, it is reasonable to advocate for it. Your argument seems to be: come off it, we don’t live in a world where people want to attain the degree of literacy that would give them the benefit of the kind of freedom Stallman is interested in. But that’s the status quo that free software exists to fight against; it is a fight for our culture to place emphasis on literacy, knowledge, power and enfranchisement for the individual, not for the theoretical freedom to tinker with particular software packages, or the trivial one, of getting them for nothing.

“Most people don’t try and hack their phones. Yeah, the k-rad k00l kids do it, but that’s the three in the corner while the rest of the world gets on with their life.”

I feel that this is a rather loaded statement. It implies that geeky kids waste their lives hacking their tech instead of living.

How do most non-geeks spend their lives? Often obsessing over celebrities whilst pursuing the latest shiny goods, and making sure their car costs more than their neighbours. At the expense of their kids’ upbringing.

But if you can hack those phones and make human to human communication easier or less expensive, and it will only benefit all of humanity in the long term. Unlike Britney “beef curtains” Spears or an SUV.

> That’s how capitalism works.

While copyright and patent monopolies exist, talking as if there were a free market is laughable. Get a clue. Free market capitalism as an economic theory is all well and good. But it’s not how the computer software industry operates, not by a hell of a long shot, and acting as if it was is stupid and playing right into the corporatist’s hands (remember, pro-business and pro-market are different things). Free software represents an attempt to free the market by combating the worst effects of copyright and patent monopoly law.

Tons of people use free software with the aesthetics of a AMC Gremlin, so appealing to taste is hardly likely. Not only do people not want to attain that level of literacy, in general, the free software movement is completely inept at going anywhere near the level of research and usability that is necessary. Talk to Alan Kay sometime about usability and programming. It’s possible, but nothing coming out of the current free software world is going down that path, so to argue that somehow that’s a driving factor is either disingenuous or delusional.

I can throw stones at how people live their lives, and often do, but the reality is that until you present something to them that interests them more, then you will continue to face the reality that nowhere in modern history has anything but a tiny percentage of the population been involved in the act of creation. We might want it to be different. We might dream that it will be some day, but that simply doesn’t make it so.

While I’m one of the strongest advocates for patent and copyright reform, I don’t see evidence out of much of the free softwaer world that they’re offering new ideas in most places. Saying that the fact that you can’t wholesale rape ideas from another company, and therefore another group of people, is somehow “un free” is absurd. Offer a new user interface model. Offer a new idea. Give that away, and demonstrate that a new model is capable of more than mimicry.

> Saying that the fact that you can’t wholesale rape ideas from another company

That has to be one of the stupidest phrases I have ever heard.

“He who lights his taper from my own does not my own diminish”. Sound familiar? It should, if you’re up on your American history.

Those who want to own ideas are the scum of the earth, they do not deserve consideration.

Oh dear, this discussion did degenerate. I suppose this is the kind of thing one should avoid discussing. But I do take it seriously, as do you, Chris, or you wouldn’t have posted about it.

My idea of the perfect interface, and the paradigm for this discussion IMO, is—language. People generally don’t want on their own to speak well or to write well, unless they have been given very good examples to imitate and are taught to do so. Literacy is not something that people just do by themselves without organization and leadership. It takes a village, etc. I’m not throwing stones at people’s lives by saying they should be more literate—I’m not personally blaming them for it, in fact. I’m pointing out that we could have a culture that prizes this kind of literacy and that we’d all benefit from it. Don’t think about this solely in terms of what some middle-aged user is going to be interested in learning to do—think about what that user should want his or her children to be able to do. I want my children to be able to manipulate these machines well enough not to be manipulated by them; that’s the bottom line for me. I see computer skills as necessary self-defense. On that time scale, a lot of change is possible.

As for “progress in UI”, I don’t really believe in it, because the effort seems to be to find a substitute for using words to express what you mean, and I think that’s fundamentally the wrong direction.

Jacob, nice to hear from you again. It’s been too long.

I think the issue I have, underlying it all, is that the discussion about inclusion of people is simply so much smoke. It’s very, very hard to expand the number of people who can express their creativity in any form, music, cooking, programming past the most rudimentary level. Doing so requires tapping into deeper understandings and cognitive processes.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. Certainly Alan Kay has managed to do an amazing job, and others as well, but I don’t see that kind of “deep thought” coming out of the open source world. That’s fine. It’s simply disingenuous to suggest that when you’re scratching your own itch that it somehow is “bettering society” or “expanding people’s capabilities”. It’s nice to think that, but doing so requires more than writing yet another editor.

I would hazard that Apple has done more for expanding the viability of computing to the masses than the entire open source world in the past 20 years. Can I document it? No. Apple didn’t even invent much of what they popularized, but they did popularize it, and that is a lot.

Natural language might be the next step, but I surely don’t know. It’s still so far out of reach at this point that it’s difficult to say. The AI Winter killed a lot of promising research, and I don’t know that the industry has ever recovered from it’s refocus on “practical” solutions, as opposed to visionary ones.