Paternalism and Freedom

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:40:53 +0200
rants

As seen in some mailinglist discussion:

"It seems to be a common belief between some developers that users should have to read dozens of pages of documentation before attempting to do anything.

"I’m happy that not all of us share this elitist view of software. I thought we were building the Universal Operating System, not the Operating System for bearded gurus."

I think this is an interesting quote as it shows an important misunderstand of what Debian is for many people.

Debian (and Linux in general) was in its beginnings quite complicated and often not very easy to use. People still felt a deep relieve to have it and a strong love. Why?

Because it's not so much about about how you can use it, but how you can fix it.

A system that only has a nice surface and hides everything below it, that does in a majority of cases just what you most likely want it is nice. But if the only options are "On", "Off" and perhaps some "something is not working as it should, try to fix it" (aka "Repair") it is essentially a form of paternalism: There is your superior that decided what is good for you, you would not understand it anyway, just swallow what you get.

Not very surprisingly many people to be in the position of the inferior of a computer (the less the more stupid the computer is, but even modern computers are still stupid enough for most people).

So what those people want is not necessarily a system that can only be used after reading a dozen pages of documentation, but a system they know they can force to do what they want even if that might then mean reading some pages of documentation.

So a good software in that sense might have some nice interface and some defaults working most of the time. But more importantly it has a good documentation, easy enough internals so one can grasp them and be transparent enough that one can understand why it is currently not working and what to do against this and then allowing enough user interference to fix it.

If all I get offered is some "interface for users too stupid to understand it anyway" and all options to fix it are checking and unchecking all boxes and restarting a lot or perhaps some gracious offer of "There is the source code, just read that spaghetti code, you can there see anything it does though you might need to build a debug version just to see why it does not work" then I would not call any strong feelings against this situation "elitist".