Authors Phil jones (he/him - ele)

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phil jones (he/him - ele)
phil jones (he/him - e...
@interstar
The Great Software Stagnation is real, but we have to understand it to fight it. The CAUSE of the TGSS is not "teh interwebs". The cause is the "direct manipulation" paradigm : the "worst idea in computer science" \1


Progress in CS comes from discovering ever more abstract and expressive languages to tell the computer to do something. But replacing "tell the computer to do something in language" with "do it yourself using these gestures" halts that progress. \2

Stagnation started in the 1970s after the first GUIs were invented. Every genre of software that gives users a "friendly" GUI interface, effectively freezes progress at that level of abstraction / expressivity. Because we can never abandon old direct manipulation metaphors \3

The 1990s were simply the point when most people in the world finally got access to a personal computer with a GUI. So that's where we see most of the ideas frozen. \4

It's no surprise that the improvements @jonathoda cites, that are still taking place are improvements in textual representation : \5
SOFTWARE
phil jones (he/him - ele)
phil jones (he/him - e...
@interstar
@6loss I think Stallman's politics is left and libertarian (where libertarian is "extreme liberal"). The intuition most of us had originally is that with enough freedom, the good drives out the bad. As you know, I think we might be discovering that that is "wrong" in some sense ... \1

But it's still a viable and attractive intuition.

And, yes, the GPL etc. is built on that. So freedom is more important than trying to constrain people to do good.
\2

Furthermore ... pragmatically, this appeal to pure freedom clearly engages and recruits more people than if Stallman had tried to use GPL to enforce his own wider political views. You have "right-libertarians" (ESR, or Lessig) on-board with GPL. \3

Finally, I think there is a question whether you could legally codify and enforce restrictions on use. GPL is all about hacking existing copyright law and its definition of "derivative". Because derivation is a well established legal idea, that bit is "easy". \4

Obviously other things like CC or GPL Affero start putting more restrictions (Eg. non-commercial, or "can't use the software on a server without sharing") which push the envelope a bit. I'm sure others have tried to put restrictions eg. "can't use for military" into licenses \5
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