

Are there Empowering vs. Enslaving softwares? - panjaro

Do apps&#x2F;software enslave or empower?
I feel there is some difference but struggling to convince myself.
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RRWagner
I thought the question was more open-ended than just IDEs. Clearly there is
consumer software designed to be addictive, and other software designed to
create things which can empower a user to do more than they could without the
software. Propietary vs. open-source isn't the issue so much as whether the
core idea behind the software is to serve the user or to capture them.

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panjaro
Yes, it is open ended. What are your examples of such differences?

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sprw121
You should really look into the works of Richard Stallman (RMS). He's done a
lot of work into showing and promoting free software as it empowers, rather
than restricts the user as proprietary software does.

[https://stallman.org/](https://stallman.org/)

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panjaro
Thanks.

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erkose
Free and open-source software is empowering
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-
source_software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software)

~~~
panjaro
I was thinking in the same line. Emacs seems to be empowering while the Visual
Studio, though is really good IDE, is kind of enslaving. More you use, more
dependent on it. In other words, open source seems to be heuristic while
closed source seems to provide set of instructions to perform certain tasks.

~~~
yzzxy
This is totally true. There are a ton of things to criticize about VS, but I
keep coming back to it because the autocomplete is _perfect._ It's so good!
[0]

Doing this in Emacs, etc, is possible. But it requires hours and hours of
setup and maintenance. Whenever somebody tries to solve this issue by making
"prepacked" Emacs config with batteries included (e.g. Prelude), people
criticize it for causing compatibility issues and not training people to
understand Emacs.[1]

Guess what? I'm a hacker, not an IDE pilot. If I want to hack on my Emacs
build, I want the ability to do so. But it shouldn't be anathema to use OSS
configs you don't understand at the lowest level, because not everyone's goal
needs to be knowing their IDE like he back of their hand. Getting people to
accept this has the potential to push FOSS tools to the forefront of
enterprise and the mainstream. Despite what you might think from the insular
posts on HN, most coders don't use Vim and Emacs, or even the more
"responsible" IDE.

[1] I wonder if this is because of the API features of Roslyn. I don't use C#
enough to have studies the compiler, but I've heard it's an amazing piece of
engineering.

[0] s/emacs/vim if you like, it applies just as well.

