Comments on: We Cured Unix – Now What?

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 11 May 2010 20:43:37 +0000

Bravo! This is very true. Strangely, even Bill Gates has been on about this in the past few years, giving out grants to encourage people to become programmers. And there is some VC money out there for new programming environments.

But one thing to keep in mind with your analogy of 1983 and the home computer’s BASIC is that people learned to program not just as “a matter of course,” but also often times as a matter of /necessity/. Loading a program on a Commodore 64, formatting a disk, or really making anything productive happen was a matter of using the BASIC interpreter and, in a way, programming. The closest an average user I see these days gets to that is using formulas in Excel, which is still no small feat for some people and I’m happy to see it. It’s just that that is really the closest to /necessary/ that programming gets for most people on modern computers.

I wonder if one could stretch the imagination to consider using a GUI to be programming. Just like how you had to learn LOAD “*”,8,1 on the Commodore 64, users have to learn move the mouse, click here, wait a second, move here, click that, etc. Gestures… responses… maybe it’s us who are being programmed :)

By: Delyan Raychev

Delyan Raychev — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:45:13 +0000

Nick,

Thank you for recording ‘free software in cars’ in your post – my question/comment at LibrePlanet2010 has been heard! (and I hope this would trigger more activism around http://genivi.org/)

I love your perspective and truly hope that Free Software would indeed empower the everyday computer user (every human). Living life amongst proprietary software developers and younger folks who have no memories of the very early (open and free) days of UNIX only makes it harder to believe that ‘the people’ really want the freedom of computing and the inherent power that comes with it.

By: Post-Medium Critique » Optimizing Metaprogramming

Post-Medium Critique » Optimizing Metaprogramming — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:26:57 +0000

[…] a discussion of free software’s future at the recent libreplanet 2010 conference, Nick Montfort shares an important observation about the need to address the oligopoly of the advanced programmer, providing alternatives and […]

By: Nikos Chantziaras

Nikos Chantziaras — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:25:40 +0000

Usually, the better software wins, not the more “free” one. And “winning” means getting established. You know, like Windows and its applications are now.

If I, a fan of free software, end up using non-free applications simply because they perform much better than their free “equivalents”, how are you going to convince the non-free-aware masses to switch? You can’t. Stallman himself said that it’s not important for free software to perform as well as non-free software as long as it’s free. A pretty weird point of view.

With that in mind, a re-implementation of Windows that doesn’t perform as well as the original is doomed to being eternally used by geeks only. You can not replace Windows with something that doesn’t perform as well. Actually, it’s quite likely that you can’t even replace it even with something that performs just as well; the only sure way would be with something that performs better.