Post #3098015

2025-08-28 15:46 UTC

@d1@autistics.life @aparrish@friend.camp Yup, I've grumbled a lot about this. The Free Software movement largely missed the point, by almost never creating tools that made end users care about the rights that they had. MS Office has more end-user programming support than almost anything from the GNU project (with the exception of EMACS, and that's only because EMACS was a reimplementation of a Lisp Machine editor). You don't make Free Software successful by using licenses that require a law degree to understand, you make Free Software successful by writing software that makes end users exercise their rights to modify and distribute software and then complain when they don't have those rights in other software that they use.

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@d1@autistics.life 2025-08-29 00:40

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @aparrish@friend.camp great post. I agree. The Unix philosophy (which is to make small, modular CLI tools that you can pipe into each other) holds back such a comprehensive vision from appearing: a complete RAD GUI IDE - the sort that only a fairly large budget and team, headed by a benevolent dictator, not a committee - could create (like Delphi). The #Unix philosophy falls on its face when it's time to create an OpenSource Delphi *that everyone would want to use, and gains traction*, a sizeable and formidable undertaking (not to mention any credible threat to Active Directory). This failing does not go unpunished: along comes Microsoft with their Visual Studio Code, filling the gap, and leading impressionable, naive #OpenSource newcomers astray to #Microsoft technologies like Azure, C#, etc.

Open ##3098016