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 ??
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.
Absolutely true.