Are there Empowering vs. Enslaving softwares?
Do apps/software enslave or empower?
I feel there is some difference but struggling to convince myself.
3 comments
I thought the question was more open-ended than just IDEs. Clearly there is consumer software designed to be addictive, and other software designed to create things which can empower a user to do more than they could without the software. Propietary vs. open-source isn't the issue so much as whether the core idea behind the software is to serve the user or to capture them.
Yes, it is open ended. What are your examples of such differences?
Free and open-source software is empowering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
I was thinking in the same line.
Emacs seems to be empowering while the Visual Studio, though is really good IDE, is kind of enslaving. More you use, more dependent on it. In other words, open source seems to be heuristic while closed source seems to provide set of instructions to perform certain tasks.
This is totally true. There are a ton of things to criticize about VS, but I keep coming back to it because the autocomplete is perfect. It's so good! [0]
Doing this in Emacs, etc, is possible. But it requires hours and hours of setup and maintenance. Whenever somebody tries to solve this issue by making "prepacked" Emacs config with batteries included (e.g. Prelude), people criticize it for causing compatibility issues and not training people to understand Emacs.[1]
Guess what? I'm a hacker, not an IDE pilot. If I want to hack on my Emacs build, I want the ability to do so. But it shouldn't be anathema to use OSS configs you don't understand at the lowest level, because not everyone's goal needs to be knowing their IDE like he back of their hand. Getting people to accept this has the potential to push FOSS tools to the forefront of enterprise and the mainstream. Despite what you might think from the insular posts on HN, most coders don't use Vim and Emacs, or even the more "responsible" IDE.
[1] I wonder if this is because of the API features of Roslyn. I don't use C# enough to have studies the compiler, but I've heard it's an amazing piece of engineering.
[0] s/emacs/vim if you like, it applies just as well.
Doing this in Emacs, etc, is possible. But it requires hours and hours of setup and maintenance. Whenever somebody tries to solve this issue by making "prepacked" Emacs config with batteries included (e.g. Prelude), people criticize it for causing compatibility issues and not training people to understand Emacs.[1]
Guess what? I'm a hacker, not an IDE pilot. If I want to hack on my Emacs build, I want the ability to do so. But it shouldn't be anathema to use OSS configs you don't understand at the lowest level, because not everyone's goal needs to be knowing their IDE like he back of their hand. Getting people to accept this has the potential to push FOSS tools to the forefront of enterprise and the mainstream. Despite what you might think from the insular posts on HN, most coders don't use Vim and Emacs, or even the more "responsible" IDE.
[1] I wonder if this is because of the API features of Roslyn. I don't use C# enough to have studies the compiler, but I've heard it's an amazing piece of engineering.
[0] s/emacs/vim if you like, it applies just as well.
You're right that it's just a heuristic. Open source can also lead to cargo-culting[1] sets of instructions for tightly circumscribed tasks: http://akkartik.name/about
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
You should really look into the works of Richard Stallman (RMS). He's done a lot of work into showing and promoting free software as it empowers, rather than restricts the user as proprietary software does.
https://stallman.org/
https://stallman.org/
Thanks.