Howard Dean and Commercial Software i don't normally blog about howard dean, no matter how impressive his internet-powered campaign is. i like and approve his deployment of Internet tools, and social networking applications, and the distributed organisational structure upon which his campaign is modelled certainly points toward a new face of political discourse. i'm not american, but i guess if i were i'd vote for dean. dave winer thinks otherwise. Wired: "If we're still in the race in a few months, I think you'll see a tremendous amount of development." Wouldn't it be great if Dean and Clark went after Viacom, ClearChannel and Time-Warner, instead of the tiny companies that make blogging and social networking tools. I find myself hoping they get their asses kicked, hard. I don't expect much of Bush, but I doubt seriously that he would undermine the mostly American software industry by competing with it with free software. Makes the Dems' pitch about exporting American high-tech jobs to India fairly hollow (NH is a high-tech state, so it has been an issue). One of the reasons American programmers aren't competing here (in America) is that users expect to get software for free, and in that environment little new stuff gets created, and we have to keep creating to justify the greater amount of money we make (over Indians). But if all we make are commodities, then Indians working for low pay beat Americans working for free. (People who work for free have no incentive to please users, or even create usable software.) How sad to see two leading Democrats fall for, even feed the lie
that they can create user-oriented software for free. Shame on both
Dean and Clark. They went after the little guy. Who wants a president
who does that. Not me. Still looking for someone worth supporting. and gregor rothfuss responds: when free beats for paydave is ranting about how free software cannot be user-oriented. i bought a license of manila, and tried radio for a while. verdict: Movable Type has a better user interface than both userland products, and costs.. $0
and dave winer comes back to him:
Movable Type is a commercial product. I find it amazing how poorly thought out the rebuttals are. Open source advocates like yourself would do well to read the Linux Advocacy Howto, and also think just a bit before you write. My issue isn't with open source, it's with the campaigns reinventing software that already works, and being two-faced about supporting American software developers. They do it when they're stumping in New Hampshire talking to out of work programmers. If you had been to New Hampshire to see the candidates you would know this. Learn Gregor, open your mind. How disappointing to see you be part
of the mob. Most of them I'm not bothering to respond to, but I thought
you were a thinker, not a slug.
now,
back to software. can f/oss software be user-oriented? of course it
can. openoffice, mozilla, kde, gnome, enlightment, and scores of f/oss
applications are being designed to satisfy end-users' needs and wants.
kde has proven time and again that f/oss can be as easthetically
appealing as any other proprietary offering. so, there's no question
here. but i think that someone 's missing the point (probably i do).
first, i reckon that all weblog platforms are user-oriented, since
their raison d'etre is to unleash the creativity of non-technically
advanced authors, etc....now, if some people think that MT is more
user-oriented that Radio, or the other way round, this is another
thing, and it essentially boils down to individual criteria. 7:13:51 PM Say it loud [] Trackback [] |
just found out that Scott Allen has a blog. always keen on your perspective scott. keep it up, and happy holidays. 6:47:54 PM Say it loud [] Trackback [] |
lets save wikipedia if you have a few spare bucks lying around, please consider donating them to wikipedia. for a week or so, their servers are down and they need to raise some extra cash - $20,000 to be exact, to buy new hardware. good cause, and great project. in much the same way that ms encarta creatively destroyed encyclopedia britannica, wikipedia is poised to creative destroy offline, dead-trees dictionaries-encyclopedias. 6:45:54 PM Say it loud [] Trackback [] |