As the maker of a piece of propriety software, you are not subject to this kind of check on your power and it is often in your interest to increase lock-in to your product from your users to make it hard for them to leave for a competitor, should they become dissatisfied.
Creating network effects to lock in users is in the interest of open-source projects the same way as it’s in the interest of propriety software. If you look in the crypto world someone who bases his technology on Ethereum or Bitcoin can get locked in even if he could fork software.
Thus free software can serve as a solution to an alignment problem between makers and users of the software.
A free software project that makes money by providing support has an incentive to make it hard enough to use the software while a propriety software might see providing support as a cost center and work hard to make the software easier to use so that less support is needed.
In many cases, free software doesn’t create incentives for companies to invest a lot of resources into making the software better for users in the same way that proprietary software does.
NPM recently had the developer of colors.js upload a version that broke a lot of programs because he had no incentive to be aligned with the users of his libraries.
If you want to look at whether incentives are aligned you actually have to look at the business models involved.
NPM recently had the developer of colors.js upload a version that broke a lot of programs because he had no incentive to be aligned with the users of his libraries.
and the fact that it was opensource let others fork it and remove the broken commit, effectively enforcing the power that the users had on the creator. Had it been a closed source (free as in beer) software, the users would have been locked out and with no recourse other than caving to the creator demands.
That retaliation allowed the users to limit the damage because they could work around it. It however did nothing that was disadvantageous to the creator and thus there was no deterrent. The parties were not aligned to cooperate.
I don’t know I’d say that guy torched a lot of future employment opportunities when when he sabotaged his repos. Also obligatory: https://xkcd.com/2347/
There is a distinction between lock-in and the cost of moving between standards, an Ethereum developer trying to move to another blockchain tech is generally moving from one open well documented standard to another. There is even the possibility of (semi-)automated conversion/migration tools. They are not nearly as hamstrung in moving as is the person trying to migrate from a completely un-documented and deliberately obfuscated or even encrypted format to a different one.
The incentive to make it difficult to use if you are providing support has some interesting nuances especially with open core models but it is somewhat cancelled out by the community incentive to make it easy for them to use. Any overt attempts to make things difficult loses the project good will with the community on which they often somewhat depend. The can be an incentive to make a hosted product difficult to deploy if you offer a hosted version, but this is often less of an issue if your are offering enterprise support packages where things other than just the convenient cloud hosting are the main value add.
Free software is not without challenges when it comes to constructing viable business models but there are some example that are working pretty well, off the top of my head RedHat, SUZE, & Nextcloud.
Any overt attempts to make things difficult loses the project good will with the community on which they often somewhat depend.
You don’t need to make any overt attempt to make things difficult to use for complex programs to become difficult to use. If you don’t invest effort into making them easy to use they usually become hard to use.
The incentive to make it difficult to use if you are providing support has some interesting nuances especially with open core models but it is somewhat cancelled out by the community incentive to make it easy for them to use.
There’s little community incentive to make software easy to use. Ubuntu’s useability for the average person is better than that of more community-driven projects.
Starting in 2008 (number from memory) Microsoft invested a lot in useability for Microsoft Office. As far as I know, there wasn’t anything similar for LibreOffice. GIMP’s usability is still similarly bad as it was a decade ago.
Even though Blender basically won, its usability is awful.
One of the key points of inadequate equilibria is that there are plenty of problems in our society where it’s hard to create an alignment between stakeholders to get the problem solved. If we would legislate that all software has to be free software then that would prevent some forms that are currently effectively used to get problems solved from getting solved.
Maybe, but I would be interested to see that tested empirically by some major jurisdiction. I would bet that in the ascendance of an easy option to use propriety software many more firms would hire developers or otherwise fund the development of features that they needed for their work including usability and design coherence. There is a lot more community incentive to to make it easy to use if the community contains more business whose bottom lines depend on it being easy to use. I suspect propriety software may have us stuck in a local minimum, just because some of the current solutions produce partial alignments does not mean there aren’t more optimal solutions available.
In-house software is usually worse as far as UX goes than software where the actual user of the software has to pay money.
Even if companies would care about the useability of in-house software, general usability is not something that you need for particular use-cases. A company is likely going to optimize for its own workflows instead of optimizing for the useability of the average user.
I don’t see why we would expect Blender to look different if open source would be legally mandated. Blender is already used a lot commercially.
Yes a lot of in house software has terrible UX, mostly because it is often for highly specialised applications, it may also suffer from limited budget, poor feedback cycles if it was made as a one off by an internal team or contractor, and the target user group is tiny, lack of access to UX expertise etc.
Companies will optimise for their own workflows no doubt but their is often substantial overlap with common issues. Consider the work the redhat/ibm did on pipewire and wire plumber which will soon be delivering a substantially improved audio experience for the Linux desktop as a result of work they were doing anyway for automotive audio systems
I’m not that current with blender but I’m given to under stand there have been some improvements in usability recently as it has seen wider industry adoption and efforts have been directed at improving UX. Large firms with may people using a piece of software are motivated to fund efforts to make using it easier as it makes on-boarding new employees easier. Though given that blender is a fairly technical and specialist application I would not be surprised if it remained somewhat hard to use it’s not like there are not UX issues with similarly specialist proprietary apps.
Blender having a bad UX is what makes it a specialist application. If it would be easier to use, I would expect more people to do 3D printing.
There’s certainly not zero investment into improving its UX but the number of resources going into that might be 1-2 orders of magnitude higher if it would be proprietary software.
Creating network effects to lock in users is in the interest of open-source projects the same way as it’s in the interest of propriety software. If you look in the crypto world someone who bases his technology on Ethereum or Bitcoin can get locked in even if he could fork software.
A free software project that makes money by providing support has an incentive to make it hard enough to use the software while a propriety software might see providing support as a cost center and work hard to make the software easier to use so that less support is needed.
In many cases, free software doesn’t create incentives for companies to invest a lot of resources into making the software better for users in the same way that proprietary software does.
NPM recently had the developer of colors.js upload a version that broke a lot of programs because he had no incentive to be aligned with the users of his libraries.
If you want to look at whether incentives are aligned you actually have to look at the business models involved.
and the fact that it was opensource let others fork it and remove the broken commit, effectively enforcing the power that the users had on the creator. Had it been a closed source (free as in beer) software, the users would have been locked out and with no recourse other than caving to the creator demands.
That retaliation allowed the users to limit the damage because they could work around it. It however did nothing that was disadvantageous to the creator and thus there was no deterrent. The parties were not aligned to cooperate.
I don’t know I’d say that guy torched a lot of future employment opportunities when when he sabotaged his repos. Also obligatory: https://xkcd.com/2347/
There is a distinction between lock-in and the cost of moving between standards, an Ethereum developer trying to move to another blockchain tech is generally moving from one open well documented standard to another. There is even the possibility of (semi-)automated conversion/migration tools. They are not nearly as hamstrung in moving as is the person trying to migrate from a completely un-documented and deliberately obfuscated or even encrypted format to a different one.
The incentive to make it difficult to use if you are providing support has some interesting nuances especially with open core models but it is somewhat cancelled out by the community incentive to make it easy for them to use. Any overt attempts to make things difficult loses the project good will with the community on which they often somewhat depend. The can be an incentive to make a hosted product difficult to deploy if you offer a hosted version, but this is often less of an issue if your are offering enterprise support packages where things other than just the convenient cloud hosting are the main value add.
Free software is not without challenges when it comes to constructing viable business models but there are some example that are working pretty well, off the top of my head RedHat, SUZE, & Nextcloud.
You don’t need to make any overt attempt to make things difficult to use for complex programs to become difficult to use. If you don’t invest effort into making them easy to use they usually become hard to use.
There’s little community incentive to make software easy to use. Ubuntu’s useability for the average person is better than that of more community-driven projects.
Starting in 2008 (number from memory) Microsoft invested a lot in useability for Microsoft Office. As far as I know, there wasn’t anything similar for LibreOffice. GIMP’s usability is still similarly bad as it was a decade ago.
Even though Blender basically won, its usability is awful.
One of the key points of inadequate equilibria is that there are plenty of problems in our society where it’s hard to create an alignment between stakeholders to get the problem solved. If we would legislate that all software has to be free software then that would prevent some forms that are currently effectively used to get problems solved from getting solved.
Maybe, but I would be interested to see that tested empirically by some major jurisdiction. I would bet that in the ascendance of an easy option to use propriety software many more firms would hire developers or otherwise fund the development of features that they needed for their work including usability and design coherence. There is a lot more community incentive to to make it easy to use if the community contains more business whose bottom lines depend on it being easy to use. I suspect propriety software may have us stuck in a local minimum, just because some of the current solutions produce partial alignments does not mean there aren’t more optimal solutions available.
In-house software is usually worse as far as UX goes than software where the actual user of the software has to pay money.
Even if companies would care about the useability of in-house software, general usability is not something that you need for particular use-cases. A company is likely going to optimize for its own workflows instead of optimizing for the useability of the average user.
I don’t see why we would expect Blender to look different if open source would be legally mandated. Blender is already used a lot commercially.
Yes a lot of in house software has terrible UX, mostly because it is often for highly specialised applications, it may also suffer from limited budget, poor feedback cycles if it was made as a one off by an internal team or contractor, and the target user group is tiny, lack of access to UX expertise etc.
Companies will optimise for their own workflows no doubt but their is often substantial overlap with common issues. Consider the work the redhat/ibm did on pipewire and wire plumber which will soon be delivering a substantially improved audio experience for the Linux desktop as a result of work they were doing anyway for automotive audio systems
I’m not that current with blender but I’m given to under stand there have been some improvements in usability recently as it has seen wider industry adoption and efforts have been directed at improving UX. Large firms with may people using a piece of software are motivated to fund efforts to make using it easier as it makes on-boarding new employees easier. Though given that blender is a fairly technical and specialist application I would not be surprised if it remained somewhat hard to use it’s not like there are not UX issues with similarly specialist proprietary apps.
Blender having a bad UX is what makes it a specialist application. If it would be easier to use, I would expect more people to do 3D printing.
There’s certainly not zero investment into improving its UX but the number of resources going into that might be 1-2 orders of magnitude higher if it would be proprietary software.