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Free software scares normal people

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Re: Free software scares normal people

#241

Post by pfannkuchen »

renewiltord wrote: post #126
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphic designers and artists get ripped off, all the time ; frequently, by nerds, who tend to do so, in a manner that insults the value of the artist's work. It's difficult to get those kinds of creatives to donate their time (trust me on this, I'm always trying). I'm an ex-artist, and I'm a nerd. I can definitively say that creating good designs, is at least as difficult as creating good software, but seldom makes…

Most fields just don’t have the same culture of collaborative everyone-wins that software does. Artists don’t produce CC art in anywhere close to the same influence as engineers produce software. This is probably due to some kind of compounding effect available in software that isn’t available in graphics. Software people love writing software to a degree where they’ll just give it away. You just won’t find artists d…

Isn’t there a lot more compensation available in software? Like as a developer, you can make a lot of money without having to even value money highly. I think in other fields you don’t generally get compensated well unless you are gunning/grinding for it specifically. “For the love of the art” people in visual arts are painters or something like that, probably. Whereas with software you can end up with people who don’t value money that much and have enough already, at least to take a break from paid work or to not devote as much effort to their paid work. I imagine a lot of open source people are in that position?

Re: Free software scares normal people

#242

Post by micromacrofoot »

lateforwork wrote: post #170
micromacrofoot wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to make the powerful version It's a little harder to make an easy version Making the progressive version is very difficult. Where you can please one audience with the powerful and easy versions, you can often disappoint both with the progressive version despite it taking much more effort. In my personal experience, you're lucky if free software has the budget (time or money) to get to easy. There's very lit…

Relevant Steve Jobs quote: "Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple." So yes, it is hard to make the simple version. You have to have a very good understanding of what the user wants out of your product. Until you have this clarity, every feature seems important. Once you have this clarity you understand what the important features are. You make those feat…

It can get very complicated when you've built an audience where you have 10 segments that think their 10% of the use case is very important and you can only focus on a couple of segments at a time!

Re: Free software scares normal people

#243

Post by autoexec »

brian626 wrote: post #146

Someone once told me “every setting you expose to your users is a decision you were too scared to make.”

That gets less true the more utility your software is expected to have.

When it comes to software intended for the general public it doesn't take bravery to decide that every user should only ever be allowed to do things exactly how you'd want them done. I might be more likely to attribute that to arrogance. Really, for something like converting audio/video I'd just see the inflexible software with few if any options as too limited for my needs (current, future, or both) and go looking for something more powerful.

It's better to not invest my time on software that is overly restrictive when more useful options are available, even if I don't need all of those options right now because it'll save me the trouble of having to hunt down something better later since I've already got what I need on my systems.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#244

Post by prepend »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #205
galagawinkle489 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they work for pay on free software? Nobody expects to be paid to work on the software itself. Yet artists expect to be treated differently. If it is your job, then go do it as a job. But we all have jobs. Free software is what we do in our free time. Artists don't seem to have this distinction. They expect to be paid to do a hobby.

Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette. It usually involves developing a design language for the app, or sometimes, for the whole organization (if, like the one I do a lot of work for, it's really all about one app). That's a big deal. Logo design is also a much more difficult task than people think. A good logo can be insanely valuable. The on…

Programming is a big deal too.

It’s not like graphic design is harder than programming.

I’d rather have crappy graphics than pay designers instead of programmers for free oss.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#245

Post by cwillu »

lamontcg wrote: post #103
zer00eyz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI != icons. UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app... This is how we get UI's that work but suck to use. This is how we allow dark patterns to flourish. You can and will happily do things your users/customers hate if it makes a dent in the bottom of the eye and you dont have to face their criticisms directly.

> UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app... Which is also why UI/UX on open source projects are generally going to suck. There's certainly no money to pay for that kind of experiment. And if you include telemetry, people lose their goddamn minds, assuming the open source author isn't morally against it to begin with. Th…

The dependency on telemetry instead of actually sitting down with a user and watching them use your software is part of the problem. No amount of screen captures, heatmaps or abandoned workflow metrics will show you the expression on a person's face.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#246

Post by robenkleene »

f33d5173 wrote: post #190

People want features, and they're willing to learn complicated UIs to get them. A software that has hyper simplified options has a very limited audience. Take his example: we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file, yet whose understanding of video amounts to wanting it to be "normal" so they can play it. For such a person, there are two paths: become familiar enough with video formats that you un…

For this example:

> we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file

Why are you arriving at the conclusion that this requires complex software, rather than just a simple UI that says "Drop video file here" and "Fix It" below? E.g., instead of your conclusion "stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works", another possibility is the simple UI I described? That seemed to me the point of the post.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#247

Post by renewiltord »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #241
renewiltord wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most fields just don’t have the same culture of collaborative everyone-wins that software does. Artists don’t produce CC art in anywhere close to the same influence as engineers produce software. This is probably due to some kind of compounding effect available in software that isn’t available in graphics. Software people love writing software to a degree where they’ll just give it away. You just won’t find artists d…

Isn’t there a lot more compensation available in software? Like as a developer, you can make a lot of money without having to even value money highly. I think in other fields you don’t generally get compensated well unless you are gunning/grinding for it specifically. “For the love of the art” people in visual arts are painters or something like that, probably. Whereas with software you can end up with people who don…

Well, early '90s Torvalds wasn't the wealthy fellow he is now and he was busy churning things out and then relicensed Linux under GPL.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#248

Post by prepend »

some_furry wrote: post #215
Dylan16807 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either you're implying that people should code for free, or your analogy is so vague as to be useless. Yeah it's a different job but they're both jobs . Why should one be free and one not be free?

Because programmers consent to programming for free. That fact does not, in any way, obligate anyone else to.

Wouldn’t designers consent to designing for free?

This seems like a self selection problem. It’s not about forcing people to work for free. It’s about finding designers willing to work for free (just like everyone else on the project).

Re: Free software scares normal people

#250

Post by alganet »

Photoshop is a clustershit of UI mess and professionals use it. Then, home users, following the popularity, also use it.

Maybe we should just say free software is amazing and not a tool for home users, in order to get home users to use it.

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