{"id":79,"date":"2004-03-25T21:30:32","date_gmt":"2004-03-26T03:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/?p=79"},"modified":"2025-02-14T21:56:15","modified_gmt":"2025-02-15T03:56:15","slug":"entry-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/?p=79","title":{"rendered":"ESR rant about GUI design"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I was very pleasantly surprised to see such abundant cluefulness in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/writings\/cups-horror.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">rant<\/a> by Eric Raymond (known as &#8220;ESR&#8221;) on the state of graphical user interfaces in open source software projects. He takes the CUPS project as a specific example, but he rightly says that it is only an example of the numerous projects that sin against the proverbial &#8220;Aunt Tillie&#8221;. Be sure to also read the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/writings\/luxury-part-deux.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">followup article<\/a>. The CUPS maintainers were actually very receptive to Raymond\u2019s comments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I must admit that I was floored. Raymond is one of the open source\/free software advocates that frequently strikes me as being a bit too much of a zealot to be taken at face value. I appreciate that Raymond and people like him (such as Richard Stallman, known as &#8220;RMS&#8221;) must exist in order to help balance the scales toward the center, but I am frequently put off by his rhetoric. For once, however, I find myself in complete agreement with him. Now that open source has proved its technical merit, those that wish to make a significant step into the average user\u2019s desktop <strong>must<\/strong>&nbsp;learn lessons such as the ones Raymond teaches here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was very pleasantly surprised to see such abundant cluefulness in a rant by Eric Raymond (known as &#8220;ESR&#8221;) on the state of graphical user interfaces in open source software projects. He takes the CUPS project as a specific example, but he rightly says that it is only an example of the numerous projects that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,8],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-geekiness","tag-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1208,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/1208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slidingconstant.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}