Python sure has changed since I last used it.

Actual lines of meaningful code: 3

I’m agreeing and expouning.

GUI and CLI are tools, both with separate advantages and disadvantages.

CLI let’s you chain different commands easily to create functionality that originally wasn’t there. It’s really flexible, but it’s also very non-obvious. Even after more than a decade of Linux usage, I still find new commands I have never heard of that do exactly what I wanted to do for a while.

GUI is great for visual stuff (nobody in their right mind would do video/audio/image editing on CLI). It’s also very obvious/explorable, so you tend to find functionality much quicker. That makes it great for any tools that you don’t use on a daily basis. And GUIs can utilise the bandwidth of human visual input much better, which makes them better whenever large amounts of data are presented.

Neither CLI nor GUI are better, they just have different use cases where they are better.

And it annoys me a lot that people don’t get that.

When you say “X is better than Y”, you always need to state for what it is better.

I agree with your statement, but encoding it in binary is annoying as hell

Could have just used propper capitalization of the acronym. Would have been equally clear.

Your actions do nothing. You complain on the internet about some guy that said something you don’t like. Nobody from FSF is gonna read it. And neither will Stallman or anyone that matters.

I don’t see you boycotting software related to FSF. And even if you do, it doesn’t even matter, since the overwhelming majority of FOSS users never donate any money at all.

You are no customer of the FSF, you just enjoy their stuff for free.

So your actions amount to angry screaming into a box.

Apparently, Stallman is a net positive for them, so they keep him.

Doesn’t mean that they in any way endorse pedophilia.

And the freedom of association also doesn’t mean that a bunch of enraged people online have the freedom to decide whom they associate with.

And apparently, in the USA there is a whole party devoted to child marriage and other ways to have sex with minors. That might be the better point to start, because they actually have a say regarding laws on that matter.

I’m pretty sure that most people are mature enough to differentiate between an organization that makes software and nothing at all to do with kids and/or sexuality and that old wierdo’s personal views.

We live in a world where huge corporations with a revenue higher than the GDP of many countries routinely exploit child labour and work their workers to death or suicide, burning whole countries and pushing climate change while at it. And yet we collectively shrug and still buy Nestle, Apple, Samsung or H&M.

A shitstorm towards such a niche and unknown organisation as the FSF really doesn’t matter. We all know the Stallman and the FSF, because we are into computers, software and/or open source. But ask any random person on the street, thew wouldn’t know who Stallman or the FSF is if you told them that it’s not Android but actually Chrome/Android SDK/Dalvik/Toybox/Linux that runs on their phone.

I totally disagree with Stallman’s views and personally I do find them pretty worrying.

But I also disagree with the concept that employers should be the executive of the court of public opinion.

We have real courts and real police, we don’t need to invent a secondary one where people lose their jobs due to shitstorms.

If you think he did something illegal, report him to the police or sue him. If not, then this is freedom of speech. Even though he uses the freedom to voice a pretty crappy opinion.

I mean, if everyone who said something that lots of people disagree with, I guess we would all be unemployed now.

Easy, add a lowercase s after the acronym: GUIs.

Apostrophes are only used if the acronym ends with s: SAS’s or alternatively SAS’, both are possible.

Gui’s? What letter does the apostrophe replace? Did you mean to say “gui is”?

So “gui is are for idiots”?

Maybe the idiot is the one who doesn’t know how apostrophes work?

Like, literally. That’s their job description.

That is true, but then you probably are in trouble ;)

That’s definitely a healthy way of dealing with that.

But with this way, something like Linux, Distros, Firefox, Blender or LibreOffice would have never happened. There are those who want to build retail-level open source software, mostly out of idealism, and then you are stuck between a non-monetizable rock and a toxic hard place.

But I totally agree with you, unless you are super idealistic, your way of handling it is probably the most healthy one and the one that will cause you the least amount of trouble. And it’s also what I do, except when I sometimes do get idealistic.

That’s basically right. But it’s quite a difference what you have to do to scratch your itch, and what you need to do for it to be useful for others.

If you do it for yourself, there are no tests or documentation or even a GUI. It’s quick and dirty, all configuration is hardcoded. If you need a different config, you’ll just change the code.

All that doesn’t really fly if you expect someone else to use the project.

On the other side, especially if it’s too polished, idiots will perceive the project as being a commercial one and demand that you do what they want.

If you don’t know the stories, maybe read up on the maintainer of core-js or Marcel Bokhorst. These two people complained about how tough it is to make good open source software. Both talked specifically about their toxic audience. So in turn the audience ridiculed them and they even received death threats.

Titles are a bit inflated in small companies, so “head of software development” meant I was the team leader of a team of 7 developers including myself. But yeah, they really thought they knew so much more about open source and open source developers than me.

I did tell them. Multiple times and in very direct words. They told me I don’t understand nerds or open source.

Both marketing and CEO are jobs where Dunning-Kruger is considered an asset, not a problem.

I had an encounter pretty similar to the one in the article at a former job.

I was the head of software development at a 10 year old “startup” with ~50 employees.

The CEO and the marketing lady walk into my office and tell me about this great new hardware (basically an underpowered server with 15 SFP+ ports for network traffic manipulation) they found somewhere in China. They don’t have an use case for that yet, but they have a solution: They will sell it really cheap (€5000) so that, I quote, “some nerds will buy it like the Raspberry Pi and they will make software for free for us”.

I ask them why they would be doing that, to which the marketing lady says “Because they are nerds. They do stuff like that.”

Needless to say, not a single “nerd” bought that dirt cheap €5000 networking device with a huge amount of SFP+ network ports as a hobby device, let alone produce free software for it.

That device was a total flop.

But it also goes to show what they must be earning if they think that anyone would spend €5000 as an impulse buy with no further reason.

I did maintain an opensource project for a while and that taught me how to do it correctly:

• Don’t. Just don’t.
• If you really, really want to, just do what you need to fulfill your needs, never do something for someone else.
• If someone is really insistent, say you’ll do it if that person pays for the implementation of the feature, and use your day job’s hourly rate for it.
• Then don’t implement anything you don’t want to, because nobody is going to pay for it anyway.

Or to put it differently: Never see your project or contribution as anything more than a hobby. You will never see an return on investment.