What Eric S. Raymond and Richard Stallman gets wrong on Jobs: TL;DR: Design is…

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What Eric S. Raymond and Richard Stallman gets wrong on Jobs:

TL;DR: Design is more than repackaging, and the sooner people like Stallman and Raymond stop ridiculing it, the sooner they will be able to fight Apples walled garden.

For those who haven't been able to follow it, these two free software gurus have both essentially said that Jobs left a harmful legacy in the software world, making "walled gardens" seem cool and crushing Freedom. And not to worry, as I've posted earlier I agree that Jobs left a questionable legacy. It's one of the reasons I haven't bought a Mac, even though as a designer I can't help but admire the work on it.

But what Raymond and Stallman doesn't do is explain how or why Apple and Jobs pulled this of and became the most successful company thus far in the 21st century, while the FSF is still waiting for the year of Linux on the Desktop. Apple, let me remind you, also compete with the monopolist Microsoft. And they are winning. Free Software has some important victories as well, like Android, but why was it Apple that broke the chains of Microsoft and not GNU/Linux?

To explain this Raymond and Stallman both ridicule the people who choose Apple products, saying in essence they are easily fooled by sparkling cool stuff:

Stallman: "Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died." http://stallman.org/archives/2011-jul-oct.html#06_October_2011_(Steve_Jobs)

Raymond: "What’s really troubling is that Jobs made the walled garden seem cool. He created a huge following that is not merely resigned to having their choices limited, but willing to praise the prison bars because they have pretty window treatments." "[Apple did] slick repackaging of design ideas from an engineering tradition that long predated Jobs, [for example the iPhone repackaging of] Danger with their pioneering Hiptop" http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3790

Well, let me break it to you Stallman and Raymond: Good presentation, good UI, good design is much more than repackaging and pretty window treatments. I know you've both heard this before, but it doesn't seem to sink in so I'll repeat it:

Design is essential to humans, because design is about emotions. Not merely the lack of frustration that comes from good usability, but the joy from something extraordinary and the feeling of belonging that comes from fitting in. It's about charisma.

What you have been doing for years is putting a candidate for President up there who is a boring public speaker, who dresses sloppily and who might have very good policies and a good administration behind him but has no means of communicating that because he doesn't like talking to people. Saying Apple is winning against Microsoft because of the pretty window treatments is like saying that people voted for Obama because he dressed in sharp suits. It reveals a disturbing lack of understanding of human behavour.

The FSF community already get this for a lot of things, like programming languages. Why do people prefer Python or Ruby over PHP or Java? Because the first two are easy to use, have charisma and feel like flying compared to the last two. They don't do that different tasks, but they are about as different in feel as they come. When Steve Jobs talks about giving freedom to his users, he is talking about giving them the freedom of a great tool - the freedom to create, read, listen, watch and consume with a smile on your face. When you are asking people to not use Macs you are asking them to give up that freedom. No wonder people are reluctant.

Design is not merely taking invented tech and repackaging it. It's about the user experience. And Apple are far from alone in caring about it. Every successful tech company have whole teams of designers working on this, and the competition is brutal. Ubuntu, Canonical and lots of different FOSS teams are trying to pick up the challenge, but building up such a culture takes years of dedication and a culture of respect for designers and design. The sooner top dogs like Raymond and Stallman understand the importance of user experience and stop ridiculing the users for "falling for" sparkling window borders, the sooner they can start helping people break out of Apples walled garden.

17 comments

Alfonso Surroca

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I'm also a designer who refuses to use Macs out of principle in an industry that's almost uniformly run on Macs. Glad to see I'm not alone. I agree that Raymond and Stallman are trivializig the issue. Android became a Linux success story because of the overall package: the constantly refined UX, the choice in hardware, even the cute Android mascot. Ubuntu seems like it's been getting there (Android 1.x UI reminded me of Ubuntu) but I'll bet Google will be the one to knock Apple down and break apart the walled garden the way Apple was to Microsoft. The desktop is going away for the average non-pro user, and Android+Chrome is in a position to be lethal to Apple and Microsoft. Partially because unlike Raymond and Stallman, Google gets it.

Gary Herreman

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Programmers care about code; users care about ease; both care about being able to do the most with their systems.

Eric Larson

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I definitely see your point, but I don't think you fully understand their perspective. For some, Free Software is bigger than the user experience. Have you ever been to a vegetarian/vegan restaurant that people rave over, just to be let down that the food just isn't that good? The fact is when you phrase your message within some contexts, you inherently limit its scope, which in turns makes the pond smaller so to speak. Someone dedicated to lifestyle that doesn't use animal products might say some restaurant is the best in town, but they've already excluded the more mainstream meat-eating variety that in all likelihood would be appreciated by a much larger audience.

I'd argue that ESR and RMS both take on a similar perspective and feel that software freedom is more important than design. I don't think either would deny that design has a much large impact in terms of user experience (Of course, I could definitely be wrong there ;)).

Bobby Fisher

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So now it's Google's garden. The walls may seem low now...and the gate propped open; eventually the walls will get higher and the gate will close. Not because they are evil; rather out of necessity. And some people will be happy, just like all those iOS users today, free of the hassles just outside the garden wall...and others will stand outside wondering why all those fools are milling about in Googles garden when they could be free!

Ray Cromwell

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Ok, I'm going to catch heat for this, so let me state up front, I have been against walled gardens, and complaining about them for ages. But now, for a dose of reality:

Most people use computers as consumer electronics devices, to get things done. They don't care about the freedom to write programs or examine source code, because they never will, just as most people could care less if they can open the hood of their car or not, since they can't be bothered to understand how a modern car engine works, they just want a pleasant drive. Most people who work 9-5, with all the modern responsibilities, raising kids, etc want to sit back at the end of the day and use something that just works, not spend endless hours tweaking or navigating gazillions of OS menus.

The walled gardens work against the paradox of choice. Hackers think that what people like is infinite configurability and the fullest feature set, because that's what hackers like. But as Jobs said, design is about focus, and simplicity is harder to engineer than complexity. Fundamentally, open source software represents a union of many people's individual focuses, so the end project often seems unfocused unless there's a benevolent UX/Design dictator coordinating everything.

When the iPhone came out (as well as the iPod), people immediately started whining "no vCard support! No MMS! No Bluetooth Profile X!" because the feature phones had been marketed to people as having all these checkbox features. Apple, removing most of the stuff you found on other phones, actually improved the user experience for people by simplifying it, and hence, gained a much wider audience. iOS is so simple, my 2 year old could use an iPhone, but was confused by Android devices with their all of their extra buttons and Context menus with hidden options.

I hope we can have a distributed, federated world, with no gardens and no gatekeepers. But ignoring the lessons from Apple and simply telling people to go buy Linux desktops and "Free" phones simply because they are free, isn't going to work if they are hard to use for most people, buggy, and simply an eyesore to look at.

Joel Pettersson

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Moreover, choosing to design well is not some philosophical statement; it's the indicator of a more capable developer. Creating visuals is just like creating code. People who aren't good enough designers like to distance design from software development, and their software is worse. Skilled individuals like Jobs can transcend the product/packaging divide because they're good enough to make the interface as groundbreaking as the implementation.

Anthony Wu

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Nice post.

I think the PC/Mac Open/Closed wars are limited to a set of disagreeable-by-nature geeks. So many people waste so much time discussing something that is irrelevant to most users, and don't kid ourselves, the users' voice matters. Imagine if we channeled all this negative energy back towards the act of designing + building better products. If a customer wants something "shiny" and "pretty", that's what the customer wants. I think it's insulting to suggest that these people don't have a valid reason of wanting such a thing. It should not be mutually exclusive to have open systems and highly usable products.

Observing my non-geek friends, they just want a device to help them get work done, express themselves, and communicate with their friends and family. The Mac and iPhone/iPad succeeds because it provides these capabilities exceedingly well. Any device/service, open or closed, that adheres to those principles, will stand a chance competing against Apple.

- 16 year Mac user. Software Engineer.

Vincenzo Ciancaglini

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Thank you. Just thank you for saying this in a way I could have never said it.

David Horn

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I believe you can even more easily sum it up thus: Stallman and Raymond see computers and their function as an end in themselves. Jobs saw computers as a means to an end. I don't think any artist who creates things on a Mac would call it a jail.

Ray Cromwell

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"Computers are a bicycle for the mind."

Daniel Gonzalez

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"Computers are a bicycle for the mind" ... and we will let you know which spare parts you can buy, where you can drive, how fast, which color your bicycle can be painted, how many people can use it and, by the way, we'll take a commission for all that.

The bicycle is not only there to drive me from A to B: it also exists, in reality, just beneath my butt. And I want it to be mine, to serve me as I see fit. It is my bicycle.

Daniel Jackson

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+Eric Larson Thanks for bringing up the FOSS focus on Freedom, it's important for understanding why Stallman and Raymond (and the FSF in general) thinks and does like they do. To me it's clear that if Freedom is more important than any other consideration, you should take all steps to ensure that Free products and services are as attractive as possible - also to people who do not care strongly about it. If the fact that it's Free is the only thing that makes it worthwhile then you've lost - but I'm pretty certain we agree on that.

+Bobby Fisher Agreed. Google is no angel, either (no-one is, really) - and that's why it's so important that open source and Design can find each other. I'd love to see ideas on how it can work better than it does now.

+Ray Cromwell But do you think there is a permanent contradiction between software Freedom and good design? Do we need a walled garden, and if we do - do we need one with no doors out? I'm far from certain, but feel both sides think the other is contradictory to it's own goals.

Daniel Gonzalez

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+Alex Satrapa - I have nothing against mechanics who can make good money (and save me time) reparing my bibycle, but I have big issues with mechanics who tell who and how my bike must be serviced, and who even forbid me to service it myself.

Regarding walled garden: "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it". That is the kind of walled garden that debian is. A walled garden where the only wall is "this wall can grow no bigger than this". If you can not see the difference to the apple walled garden, then I guess there is no more point in discussing further.

Max “MaxFragg” K.

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the first problem I see, is the unprooven claim that apples userinterface-design would be superior to win/kde/gnome/whatever, since I can't see that, they managed for some time to get a quite consistent UI, that looked more uniform than MS did acomplish till Win7, but with OSX 10.7 Apple did destroy lots of these things in favor of a ton of new UI-widgets (the new calendar, this lauchscreen, the whole UI of the appstore, iTunes strange closebuttons ....
Seriously, the Gnome community has managed to achive a uniform userexperience far better than apple does at the moment

Brian Carnell

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+Slava C "Problem is that you (and others who think along the same lines) seem to forget that there is not one "bicycle maker" out there."

Right, because it is not like Apple isn't suing everyone they can think of on the claim that all two wheeled vehicles violate their patents.

Daniel Gonzalez

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+Slava C: you are correct, there are other mechanics who are not imposing restrictions on the bikes they sell. They let you repare them and paint them pink.

That is exactly what we are saying: Apple the mechanic is restrictive, and it must be known. If ultimately the user does not care about this, it will be of course his fault. On the same lines that democratically electing a dictator is the fault of the voters - if the intent is known.

The first step for the user to choose freely is to highlight the cases where Apple is resctricting the freedom of the users - it is not like Apple is going to run an advertising campain about it. They stick to legalese in their licenses (as required by law), and most of the users can not understand that - myself included.

But the user have the right to collectively educate themselves. So we do.

Daniel Gonzalez

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Slava C, that is interesting. On the one hand you recognize that Apple is restrictive, on the other hand you complain about us making it an important issue.

Clearly you think that usability is important, and that the issue of freedom is a secondary one. Fine, that is your choice.

But think about a world where everybody would think like you do. Everybody would choose Apple, accepting some restrictions to our freedom in exchange for a great product. On the long run, alternatives would die out, and we would be left with great products on the hands of a handful of oligopolists.

The moment when you decided that you needed the freedom that you have already discarded, you would not find it anywhere. You seem to think that an alternative product, can appear as soon as the user creates demand for that.

I am not so optimistic: I think that without rising the alarm in advance, we would soon end up a in world where we loose the freedom to use our devices as we wish to.

So the people rising the alarm right now, and using alternative platforms which are freer than the Apple ecosystem, are doing you a service: they are keeping your choices open for the moment when you think that enough is enough and that you would like to regain control of your life.

Do you have a plan? Are you planning on not needing these freedoms at all, never ever? If you are not sure about this, please acknowledge the service we are doing you by keeping your choices open, and stop calling us names.

And if you are sure you will never need those freedoms, please realize that there are people with other priorities in life apart from being able to download the very latest single from Justin Bieber.

I am all for technical progress, but my freedoms must be respected. Always.

Slava C "Having said that, I really do view the idea that Apple is restrictive more as an ideological issue than a usability one. The restrictions placed on users are no more severe than they are in other OS's (mobile or desktop) and at the end of the day the only thing users care about is "can I do X and do it easily?"."

There, for your reading pleasure:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/sep/14/apple-phone-story-rejection

"Apple bans satirical iPhone game Phone Story from its App Store
Removal of game that includes references to child labour and factory-worker suicides reignites debate about how Apple treats apps differently to music, books and films"

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