The problem (apart from capitalism, obviously) is that people can't code.
So while it's obvious to hackers that the best outcome is when code is and is kept in the commons, to most people the only advantage of #FreeSoftware is that it's free as in beer.
They cannot really study, modify and distribute forks of the software they use, be it proprietary or not.
To change this state of things we need to work on at least two aspect of our society: #Culture and #Technology.
We need systems designed to compose and we need to teach people why and how to code and debug.
Then people will find unacceptable to not being able to hack their own software.
www.inkandswitch.com/end-user-โฆ
/via mastodon.xyz/@zenhack/10294252โฆ
@zenhack @grainloom
> Its rich history reaches back to the 1960s with programming environments like Smalltalk and Logo. Notable successes since then include Unix, the spreadsheet, Hypercard, and HTML. And today, newcomers like Zapier, Coda, and Siri Shortcuts are trying their own approaches to automation and dynamic modeling.
> But despite forty years of commercial products, open source, and deep academic work, we have yet to reach an end-user programming utopia. In fact, the opposite: today our computing devices are less programmable and less customizable than ever before.
Talking to computer IS talking to people these days.
And I'm not thinking of smartphones and social networks.
Any code not written to be read from a human is garbage that no machine is going to execute correctly. Because bugs are just evidence of the #GIGO information law.
And yes, this means that the overwhelming majority of today #computing IS #garbage.
This should inspire us.
Because as long as we run such garbage we consume more energy than required, both during the development, during debug and during execution.
#Mainstream software is the only garbage that we could throw away without increasing global pollution and, instead, decreasing it.
Each day I think we should throw away everything and start from scratch.
- The BASIC era
- The Excel era
- The HyperCard era which degenerated into an HTML era whuch degenerated into the Web Stack
- Here's where we need to create the next era of development usability and composability