in the ‘why free software is still not winning’ category
“Some may say iPhone [is the most advanced smartphone] but there is no more than great usability … on it.” —Avi Ah, yes, no more than great usability. Apple will have to content themselves with the...
View Articlealmost-post-vacation software playing/lazyweb/misc.
I still have one more week of vacation, which means I’ve been starting to play a bit with software to get my brain off law for a while. Some notes: lazyweb: as previously mentioned, I’ve got a remote...
View Articlethe linux desktop’s change problem
[NB: this could easily have been titled ‘the software industry’s innovation problem’, since the problem applies broadly to all sorts of software development, and what I’m talking about as ‘change’ is...
View Articledo “open UIs suck”? or do “UIs without vision suck”?
Tim Lee is quite close to something very smart here, I think, and related to something I’ve been pondering for a while: why are so many open source software UIs typically bad? Tim’s primary answer, I...
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A Quick Note on Conspicuous Text, also known as ALL CAPS
[Quick followup: (1) Matthew Butterick, of Typography for Lawyers fame, has added a thoughtful comment that anyone reading the post should read; and (2) to be clear, nothing here is my original work or...
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Format(ting?) of Forever
Mark Pilgrim had a great post1 a little while ago where he talked about Docbook as ‘The Format of Forever’, but HTML as the ‘Format of Now.’ He also argued that (since technical books were constantly...
View ArticleWhy feed reading is an open web problem, and what browsers could do about it
I’ve long privately thought that Firefox should treat feed reading as a first-class citizen of the open web, and integrate feed subscribing and reading more deeply into the browser (rather than the...
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Software that liberates people: feels about FSF@30 and OSFeels@1
tl;dr: I want to liberate people; software is a (critical) tool to that end. There is a conference this weekend that understands that, but I worry it isn’t FSF’s. Feelings are facts, by wrote, CC BY...
View ArticleReinventing FOSS user experiences: a bibliography
There is a small genre of posts around re-inventing the interfaces of popular open source software; I thought I’d collect some of them for future reference: Recent: Drupal WordPress: ma.tt, wp.com...
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Free as in … ? My LibrePlanet 2016 talk
Below is the talk I gave at LibrePlanet 2016. The tl;dr version: Learning how political philosophy has evolved since the 1670s shows that the FSF’s four freedoms are good, but not sufficient. In...
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