Open source projects are too dogmatic for their own good
Open source projects are too dogmatic for their own good
Why are open source projects too rigid and stuck in dogmatic position ?
take for example mastodon, its CEO recently posted a toot asking who has already considered deleting facebook / threads after the recent controversies, but on the other hand ignores that his stubbornness about certain points like not adding quotes just doesn't make the project appealing for ordinary people, this feature has been the most request since twitter exodus two years ago. and at every surge of new users mastodon struggles to keep them using the platform, why do these projects struggle to acknowledge what people want the most and deliver on it.
another example is LibreOffice, I was trying to get acclimated to this new office suite and was happy to find that I can theme it to my liking to ease up my transition. but it wasn't long before I found out how tiny dogmatic decision really pushes to give up on it. I found that LO doesn't auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in "proper English". line breaks don't qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.
For people coming from proprietary software that among many short comings still strive to offer the best features and smoothest user experience, it is hard to try and stick to open source projects and even contribute back.
Should big OSS project shift to more democratic structures, where decisions are made based on consensus? or do you think the actual models are fine, and I am an entitled user ??
As a developer (not affiliated with either of those projects), you have to understand a couple of points:
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Adding features means increased maintenance burden. Any feature that is added must be tested and maintained, and once released, often cannot be changed without significant user push back.
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Users often have no idea what they actually want. If a project just implements what every user asks for, it'll end up being a disjointed mess of a project. Developers have to draw a line somewhere.
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Unless someone is paying for the work, developers have zero incentive to make changes. A democratic committee can make all the requests they like, but unless the developers are on board, nothing will happen. (Also, tying into 2, but good luck getting a committee of users to agree on anything)
The only real answer is to fork the software, make the changes and hope that either everyone switches to your fork, or the upstream accepts the changes. That is the Open Source way of doing things.
Users often have no idea what they actually want.
This is really important and often underemphasized. People don't reflect on why they feel they want X or Y. We don't know if it's some objective reason or a product of an arbitrary decision some other software maker taught us. Famous example for this is pinch-to-zoom. The first people who tried it on the iPhone found it seriously unintuitive and even difficult. Apple spent a lot of effort teaching people to pinch-to-zoom. Then you have the case where we don't even know what we might like if we haven't experienced it. The do-what-people-want mantra runs into these and other rrlated problems and projects that live by it often aren't the best things out there. Good projects typically do a mix of both. Human-computer interaction / UX are legitimate research disciplines for a reason and they've yielded very useful heuristics to produce better software.
Requirements gathering is really really difficult, and its why I am currently not worried about an LLM taking my job.
For my work, I had a project where the requirements were gathered for us, which stated that A was completely forbidden, but X, Y and Z were required. We developed to that spec, released it, and it turned out that the users actually needed A all along. We added A, and now A is the only feature they use... Shame, because X, Y and Z were cool features, and I was really proud of them, but a complete waste of time developing them.
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...You are considering abandoning Libre Office because it doesn't auto-capitalize after line breaks?
I found that LO doesn’t auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in “proper English”. line breaks don’t qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.
Why would you even want that? It's dangerous to change written text automatically, a lot of people will be annoyed because they wanted exactly what they wrote. Capitalizing after . or ? makes enough sense to automate it because of grammar rules, but there's no hard-and-fast rule for capitalization after line breaks.
That's an aucorrenct feature that has been shipped with MS Word for as long as I can remember.
MS Word is one of the most used software il the planet, I believe Microsoft has enough data on why the majority of people want that. what I don't get is why software with smaller userbases think they know better (ie sometimes they do). Or why LibreOffice is so stubborn on keeping the menu bar default instead of the ribbon-bar, I am not inconvenienced by changing it once and for all, but I know many people who ould nope out at first sight and never give LO a second chance ever again .
MS Word is essentially a monopoly, but that doesn't mean that every detail of its features is worth copying - quite the opposite, actually. And again, why do you even want to automatically capitalize the first word after a line break that is not a proper sentence stop?
Or why LibreOffice is so stubborn on keeping the menu bar default instead of the ribbon-bar
AFAIK many users, especially those used to the old UI, dislike the ribbon design.
You are just assuming, that MS actually knows and cares for what users want. In my experience its the other way round. MS will introduce a change/new behavior and user have to adjust their own behavior, because most are not willing to switch to a competitor program.
I remember very well how much my father sweared at the computer because MS changed the UI to the ribbon bar. It wasn't at all what he wanted and MS didn't care to ask users beforehand.
About the Ribbon: Apparently M$ has a patent (or multiple ones on) it, so they ultimately have the last say on what is and isn't allowed. They did make a licence availiable royalty-free, but I assume that that licence didn't cover enough of what LibreOffice needed, so they probably struck a deal with M$ about having the option, just not as the default.
I haven't researched this all that much, so mostly speculation. Although the M$ having a patent part of someting so true. And that patent (apparently) explicitly states that use in directly competing software with M$'s is forbidden, at least for-profit.
Idk, maybe it's a case of patent restrictions, or LibreOffice being LibreOffice.
Honestly, a really interesting rabbit-hole.
It annoys me to no end whenever MS word does that.
Proprietary software is also really dogmatic. Steve Jobs famously didn’t support flash on the iPhone, there also was no direct access to files/file system in the UI for a very long time. Tim Cook told someone’s Mom to just buy an iPhone to access iMessage. There’s too many user hostile dogmatic positions from Apple.
I think this has nothing to do with open source vs proprietary, but rather specific individuals having power/control over the software to force specific decisions.
Sideloading apps to ios is still a huge difficulty. Also, not possible to access a terminal to the underlying system. No way to modify audio output. All of these are basic things on android.
Why is open source dogmatic? Because every line of code should have a purpose. Features are inherently optional and often cloud the project from the initial objective.
Few people are paid to maintain this category of software so they want to keep things manageable. Omitting features is the easiest way to limit edge cases and keep up with your dependencies.
You know that Mastodon is implementing quote posts though, right?
on their website's roadmap section it says it is planned. I don't know how much work has been done on that. mean while Mastodon's userbase is dwindling, and it hasn't been able to capitalize on the many waves of exodus and twitter controversies for over two years now
The last release noted that quote posts were on deck for the next feature release.
it hasn't been able to capitalize on the many waves of exodus and twitter controversies for over two years now
You're making the assumption that it wants to.
The goals of Mastodon are very different from Twitter.
If you want quote post right now, without having to wait for mastodon to implement it, why not just use misskey or any other *key fork.
GNOME.
Specifically their decisions on CSD over SSD (client and server side decorations)
I haven't really had any other dogmatic issues with projects.
I honestly think they gave developers what they wanted with that, the CSD facilities are easy to use, well integrated and pretty uniform... But on the other hand some software demands (or it at least strongly prefers) complete customization (think WinAmp), and that is now possible.
I really like working with GNOME. Really wished I could find a job working with it again.
I get where you're coming from but I wish apps on GNOME could look uniform even without everyone kneeling to libadwaita, and we could just get uniform theming on all DEs.
If an OSS project wants to thrive, it would behoove them to implement things that people want. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution there, but they shouldn't be surprised if nobody wants to use their software because it doesn't do what they want.
The goal for OSS projects is always different. Many projects solve a problem for the developer(s) and them alone. They don't care about it 'thriving' or adding features that don't align with that problem.
I find it confusing when people complain that other people won't spend time implementing things that they want. If you want feature A, fork the project and add it. I appreciate that's easier said than done, but if you can't or won't do that, stop complaining about what other people do with their time.
Not all software is the same. Get used to them being different.
Mastodon can be janky and it is honestly hard to use, especially of you never used Twitter either. For me, Libreoffice does its thing and ocuppies much less space and less intrusive than Microsoft Office. Open-source projects tend to be less polished than commercial ones due to lack of funding. 98% of open-source projects are completly free, while things like Microsoft license keys cost the price of a lower-end computer