On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 12:18:07AM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > If "we" want increase the number of outsiders to be part of the
> ecosystem, then do it on our terms
>
> :-)
>
> You can't do it *all *on your terms. Because nobody would come at all. But
> you can have what's important to you.
>
> Apple actually didn't win because it had a big marketing department and
> psychologists. Just Steve. I worked with Steve for 12 years, and during
> part of that time had an office right across from his at Pixar. Steve
> understood a lot of stuff that would help Free Software. His lessons are
> right there for us to use, if we can only make ourselves listen.
>

Beyond the legends, Apple wins because they have always treated their
users like monkeys to be locked in (something that they have been
extremely successful at), and have focused on an extremely reduced set
of supported hardware.

GNOME has tried to do the same: treat their users as monkeys, deciding
what they would be enabled to do and what they shouldn't fiddle
with. They have built the myth of the "average desktop user", and they
have decided what such average desktop user should look like and what
she would like to do with their desktop, mostly without asking actual
desktop users if they agreed with that myth. You can't complain if
more than a few people in the community are pissed off by this
attitude: I like to tinker, and I have used GNU/Linux because it
allows you to tinker. If an interface pretends to treat me like a
stupid, that's just not for me.

Steve Jobs understood that users must be won with eyecandies, and on
that side we will never be able to beat Apple. Not because Free
Software cannot produce better eyecandies, but because the newly-won
users, lured through eyecandies, would flee back to Apple as soon as
Apple provides a more appealing set of eyecandies. We should win users
on more fundamental aspects, like freedom, but you cannot force
anybody to be free against their will. Freedom is a choice, to be made
again every single day, and has a cost.

HND

KatolaZ

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