Poor attempt at philosophy? No. This merely describes the daily situation here, and I find myself agreeing with most all of what he says. He is very well-spoken, and I believe it resonates with many people from the Netherlands.
>> OSS is very good at innovation and infrastructure, but is very, very, VERY poor at user experience.
I agree with you here. As a designer, I have helped out FLOSS projects with UX design and usability. However, the environment is such that if you would suggest UX could be improved, the response often is that devs feel insulted because you are dissing their code (which is not the case, but they don't see that).
On the other hand, taking a look at WordPress, they invested quite some time in user testing and improving UX by professionals, and that makes it one of the most usable web publishing platforms out there.
So, it would be too easy to say all FLOSS is bad at UX, but most developers don't even see it as an actual discipline, and hence do not see a problem.
As a designer, I'm sure you recognize that not all feedback from someone who calls himself a designer is going to have equal quality, and shouldn't automatically get a pass. Also, you surely must know that a lot of design and UX critique is highly subjective...
Since you are here, I think you probably also understand that sometimes a complete redesign amounts to a large quantity of boring work, and that an open source developer might have set other priorities for future improvement, or just not see that much return on the time investment relative to other things which remain to be done.
The word for someone who is really nice to you and changes the whole project at your whim is 'employee' or 'contractor.' If I devised and have worked on an OSS project for years and some guy comes out of the blue basically saying that I should reallocate months of free labor in order to make something to someone else's tastes, can you not see why that would be the sort of suggestion I would take with a big grain of salt?
This post perfectly illustrates the kind of passive aggressive statement that can light the touch paper of a flame war. It's essentially the same as saying "it just works" from an Apple perspective. It's another example of tribalism and closed thinking.
I believe it has value because it puts a question to the nature of the Internet as we now use it. As it is being more and more regulated, where do we draw the line on who we can exclude? How far does that exclusion go?
Ideally everybody should always be allowed access. The Internet is a machine for sharing information, after all, and that is a liberty. Yet current intellectual property-oriented lawmakers implement all kinds of weird half-functional rule to it, changing it.
That, and also taking a look at the Internet as a religion is quite entertaining. He is echoing the splits such as those of the catholic church, early christianity, zoroastrian religions, etcetera.
I found it very good to read about something I never question and love through the eyes of an outsider.
While it is a very broken analogy, after reading your post I did get a better understanding for what he was going for and it gained a bit of entertainment and mild insight value. Thank you.
Love this comment: “Or they blew all their money on bitches and dope, and now need to extort money from a band that actually mattered in the course of history.”
This blog post is misleading. The non-support was specifically aimed at older versions of IE.
And besides, IE has not proven the most reliable of partners, I totally get their move. You never know when your phone's gonna be red hot with IE9 customers because Microsoft decided to update some obscure DLL which breaks CSS line-height in em's or something...
Poor attempt at philosophy? No. This merely describes the daily situation here, and I find myself agreeing with most all of what he says. He is very well-spoken, and I believe it resonates with many people from the Netherlands.