F/OSS follies

[prime]

My rule is to use the best tool for the job, regardless. Sometimes that is BSD and open source software, and sometimes it is Windows and commercial software. I have no ideology except realism.

But, sometimes, the F/OSS manages to hammer home a point: stuff that volunteers build reflects what the volunteers want to do, not what makes the best tool. You can see this in absolute pieces of shit like LibreOffice, Wikipedia, or Mastodon that work badly and glitch constantly, but are an "easy answer" to tell others so lots of people use them and hide how much they are mediocre.

My phone needed a new SMS client, so I went over to F-Droid to check out what was there. I tried a new client, "Fossify," and at first gave it the utilitarian thumbs-up. It seems to work OK. But then, the glitches emerged. It lost track of group threads. It refused to send JPGs at random. It was very slow.

All of this shows that much as the best tool for the job is the right choice, the best tool for the person or people to make the tool is also a big question. Some have the motivation to excellence, and others ignore basic glitches.

If I had a wish for the F/OSS community, it would be for it to have a different core of supporters than the people who hung out at demonstrations, shopped at organic grocery stores, and boycotted big corporations by buying weird off-brand alternatives. They are fanatics, and this means that like the Apple fanbase, they are blind to the defects of what they are promoting.

In my view, the original shareware authors had it right: remove ideology, focus on practicality. If you send out your software as shareware, people will use it but also hold it up to the higher standards of the market and not ideology. You probably get the same ratio of purchase-to-piracy anyway.

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