You poor Americans :( In Europe I can get 1Gbps for around 25 Euro/month from a local (they only operate in my town) ISP. Each town has one or two of them. On top of that you have the big ones like Orange. I could choose from probably 10 different providers. New buildings just come with fiber preinstalled. Just plug in the router and enjoy.
With some tools open source has many advantages, with others it’s mostly about transparency. IMHO this case is the latter case. You won’t gain much by being able to fork it. I don’t like it when people criticize projects only because those don’t align with their personal philosophy. Don’t use it if you don’t like it but there’s really no good reason for others to avoid it.
But you cannot (or shouldn’t) jump from one extreme to another. There’s gate keeping like “I’m the one deciding what’s good, everyone else is stupid” (which I’m not doing, other people can like different things, that’s fine) but on the other side of the spectrum is the “everyone is equally competent to judge what’s good” which is just as wrong. Because of course not everyone is. For example if a lot of drunk/high people enjoy a silly song at a party and are having fun in the very moment, does it make the song “good” even if they wouldn’t listen to it sober? Of course not. Drunk people are not competent to judge art. There’s no “art for drunk people”, there’s just drunk people enjoying anything you show them. Not having proper knowledge or exposure to real art is similar to being drunk. You can get affected by simpler things, it’s easier to manipulate you, you don’t appreciate as much detail. Is pro Wrestling as good art as Shakespeare? Of course not. Pro Wrestling is as simplistic as it gets, it’s theatre dumbed down to it’s simple audience. It’s designed to affect people on a very basic level just like some music is designed to affect drunk and high people. It’s more simple entertainment than art. It’s really like putting someone on the roller coaster and saying that it’s as good art and the Exorcist because they got equally scared. Just because simple people enjoy simple movies and music doesn’t mean it’s good art.
So what’s the actual problem is? It’s just a front end to other platforms, they will not lock you in and than break the app. You can use it and if it goes bad you switch to other front end. I would understand the ‘not free’ objections if it was a tool you introduce into our workflow that would later be hard to replace. Here there’s no lock in. What do you care if it can be forked?
Yes, I get what you mean. That’s a very common take. “One person likes this painting, another one doesn’t. We can´t say if it’s good, it’s subjective”. I guess I’m bad at articulating my objection to this take. I think what I misses is that a lot of people are stupid and simply wrong. A lot of people don’t have proper education and never went to a museum. They simply haven’t been exposed to proper art and now even when they see it they don’t understand it. So should we say that for example Marvel movies are good art because some schmucks that never saw a good movie in their lifes like it? I don’t think so. It can be “good” to them but we can objectively say they don’t know shit. And I’m not saying all “high” art is good and all “popular” art is shit. So called experts are also often wrong and some famous artists are overhyped. How you seen the things Marina Abramovic was doing? It’s shit but she fooled a lot of “experts” and now you can’t say it’s shit because she’s famous. And I’m also not saying only the things I like are good art. I don’t like a lot of things that are not bad, just not in my taste. But I can also tell the difference between good art and empty entertainment even if I do enjoy it. A lot of people can’t. And they are wrong.
What makes art or media “good” is a collective agreement on what “good” is. What standards we all agree upon. This means that if you say it’s shit thats you opinion, ita not an objective fact. Its subjective. What is it they say? beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One mans trash is another mans treasure.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. You claim that it’s about “collective agreement” and each person’s individual opinion at the same time. Those are two different things. If it’s about personal opinion than collective agreement doesn’t matter. If it’s about collective agreement than my individual opinion doesn’t matter. Which one is it?
And I just gave you different meanings of ‘being in a bubble’. You’re simply using it wrong. But the fact that you refuse to accept that doesn’t mean that you’re in a bubble because it’s not what it means.
And yes, what is or isn’t good art or even what is or isn’t art over all is a matter of personal philosophy. You could argue that anything man made is art. You could say that every mass produced plastic toilet plunger is a work of art as long as one person in the world finds it beautiful. And my only argument against it would be my personal philosophy that there’s more to art than opinion of few individuals and that art and especially good art needs to fulfill higher standards than that. In my opinion you can objectively tell how creative, original and well executed a work of art is and by that you can judge how good it is.