Comment by runn1ng
11 years ago
> Free Software gets you nice, simple, easy to use services
While there are many upsides to free software, usability and user friendliness were never one of them.
Hackability, sure. But most people don't care, let's be frank. I will use Hacker News because it works despite being proprietary software.
Hacker News is not proprietary software. It's open source under the Perl Foundation Artistic License 2.0 (FSF compatible). It's even written in Arc Lisp, which is nifty.
Some of us do care.
Nice, I did not know. Really
Where is the source code?
The language: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html
Source code https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/
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But free software can do things proprietary can't, like maintain trust with the user and provide maximum good. Think about all the good things people could do with facebook but have been blocked because facebook wants to protect their one narrow use case. Social Networks won't reach their full potential until they're totally free software, because facebook has such narrow interests.
So sure, you're happy for now, but billions of people are getting spied on and getting sick of it, and out of work programmers are increasing for number every year. As users get more fed up with proprietary companies jerking them around, I feel like people will start to demand Free Software. However this may be what all engineers who fall for Free Software think... I make Free Hardware so my plan is to prove why Free is better to people. We'll see if I succeed! I just recently realized that was the issue so I am working on that now.