Free software scares normal people

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.

Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.

The contributors of free software tend to be power users who want to ensure their use case works. I don't think they're investing a lot of thought into the 80/20 use case for normal/majority or users or would risk hurting their workflow to make it easier for others

> contributors of free software tend to be power users

or, simply put, nerds

it takes both a different background, approach and skillset to design ux and interface

if anything FOSS should figure out how to attract skilled artists so majority of designs and logos doesn't look so blatantly amateurish.

My guess is that, as has always been, the pool of people willing to code for free on their own time because it's fun is just much larger than the people willing to make icons for software projects on their own time because they think it's fun.

Graphic designers and artists get ripped off, all the time; frequently, by nerds, who tend to do so, in a manner that insults the value of the artist's work.

It's difficult to get those kinds of creatives to donate their time (trust me on this, I'm always trying).

I'm an ex-artist, and I'm a nerd. I can definitively say that creating good designs, is at least as difficult as creating good software, but seldom makes the kind of margin that you can, from software, so misappropriation hurts artists a lot more than programmers.

Most fields just don’t have the same culture of collaborative everyone-wins that software does. Artists don’t produce CC art in anywhere close to the same influence as engineers produce software. This is probably due to some kind of compounding effect available in software that isn’t available in graphics.

Software people love writing software to a degree where they’ll just give it away. You just won’t find artists doing the same at the same scale. Or architects, or structural engineers. Maybe the closest are some boat designs but even those are accidental.

It might just be that we were lucky to have some Stallmans in this field early.

There's actually a fair bit of highly influential CC-licensed artwork out there. Wikipedia made a whole free encyclopedia. The SCP Foundation wiki is it's own subculture. There's loads of Free Culture photography on Wikimedia Commons (itself mirrored from Flickr). A good chunk of your YouTube feed is probably using Kevin McCleod music - and probably fucking up the attribution strings, too. A lot of artists don't really understand copyright.

But more importantly, most of them don't really care beyond "oh copyright's the thing that lets me sue big company man[0]".

The real impediment to CC-licensed creative works is that creativity resists standardization. The reason why we have https://xkcd.com/2347/ is because software wants to be standardized; it's not really a creative work no matter what CONTU says. You can have an OS kernel project's development funded entirely off the back of people who need "this thing but a little different". You can't do the same for creativity, because the vast majority of creative works are one-and-done. You make it, you sell it, and it's done. Maybe you make sequels, or prequels, or spinoffs, but all of those are going to be entirely new stories maybe using some of the same characters or settings.

[0] Which itself is legally ignorant because the cost of maintaining a lawsuit against a legal behemoth is huge even if you're entirely in the right