Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@maya (You really want to shut off the entire power circuit, not just flip the switch, because often only one of the wires is actually switched)

@maya Depends on country/system, but residential fixtures in NL are generally just two wires and 2-4 screws into the ceiling, it's not too hard but you need to shut off the power circuit first and you'll be working above your head

@whreq Toch helaas net geen september meer :)

So apparently a very specific problem that I've been working on solving in my database project (transparent reindexing upon Unicode version changes) is basically just unsolved in PostgreSQL, and it just caused a serious outage at Google's hosted SQL stuff..

"Capitalism drives innovation" my ass, why does my hobby project account for a failure mode that your billion-dollar corporation doesn't

@colapunk Hoi!

"No, $software is fine, users just need to learn how to use it"

"That's a stupid feature, nobody should ever need that"

If you've spent any amount of time in FOSS circles, you've probably seen sentiments like that all over the place. Unfortunately, they're a big part of why dubious corporations (eg. Microsoft, Google, etc.) have been able to co-opt the FOSS community.

Why? Because regardless of what you, as a technical FOSS person, believe is "necessary"... users are not going to care about that. They have certain expectations from their software in terms of feature set and ease-of-use.

Either you meet those expectations, or users go elsewhere.

Now, "it's FOSS, it gives you freedom" can sway that decision *somewhat*, but it only gets you so far. Most people care more about getting their stuff done, than they care about (to them) abstract ideals of "freedom".

And because of that, you're setting yourself up to be vulnerable to corporate capture - because corporations can superficially *claim* to do FOSS, but provide an actually accessible user experience, and suddenly everybody flocks to the corporate thing.

And sure, corporate FOSS has real problems compared to community-run FOSS. But understanding that requires a degree of nuance that most people won't see, and that you frankly cannot expect from people for whom FOSS isn't their whole existence. It's specialized knowledge.

Which boils down to a very simple reality: either *you* provide the UX that users want, or a corporation will do it for you, and with none of the community governance and long-term sustainability. Those are the options.

A great example of this is systemd; yes, it has plenty of problems. But because of the widespread insistence in FOSS circles that "nobody needs more than SysVinit", everybody flocked to an actually usable alternative the moment it appeared, monolithic design and corporate governance be damned.

Don't be that person. Listen to users about their needs. Take complaints about UX and accessibility seriously. If you don't, then you're not helping FOSS; you're harming it.

@elilla Mood