Memes

There's no denying that WEI is evil. It may in fact be the feature that kills the Chrome Browser and gets Google fined into poverty.

But from a user standpoint; I get it. It Just Works. That polish built into Chrome that allows users to sync their browsing sessions across machines? It's absolutely critical and required.

The FOSS community has this weird habit of requiring it's users to make sacrifices to meet it's values. Where that doesn't harm the user, their workflows or their convenience in general; users are typically more than happy to do so.

However; A lot of FOSS and FLOSS projects tend to take ridiculous stances against certain kinds of polish features and will REFUSE to implement them no matter how many people ask. In my opinion; if you want a software project to succeed and overtake massive competition; that's just stupid. Especially when it's as easy as forking a repository and baking the "Controversial feature" into the user-friendly fork version.

If you want to provide a core piece of software and all; sure! Please do that! But a lot of projects don't, and won't spend any time on user experience at all; and any kind of work on the UX arises because something is inconvenient for the devs.

Worse is that oftentimes; the polish features that are being blanket denied and intentionally omitted from the software are in fact not that complicated to implement in a manner that runs consistent with the values of the FLOSS community. Sure; that means that perhaps you do have to host a lot of things yourself to make sure that you truly retain control over your data; but that's actually pretty easy to learn how to do.

I do understand the limitations of the average FLOSS project. Unfortunately; a lot of FLOSS and FOSS devs are very quick to decide that they know the best, and will frequently and often refuse to listen to the user. That's not better. It's worse. At least when a user is a customer, they have some degree of influence and can exert some small force on development priorities. In the FLOSS community; you can donate every cent you have to a project and it does not necessarily guarantee that you will get a say, or even one request, fulfilled. For some users; that is not better, it is worse.

We still have a long way to go before we reach a society with the maximum amount of balance between beneficial qualities, and none of the negative qualities, of socialism and capitalism.