I think they addressed that point pretty clearly. The author says that just because the user experience of sticking your hand into your kitchen and instantly receiving food is fantastic, doesn’t mean that letting someone you don’t know live in your kitchen and only eating what they decide to make you is a good solution, especially since it means you couldn’t use your kitchen (which I believe is a metaphor for your smartphone) for anything else even if you wanted to. Further, those who believe it’s a good solution because it is free and its user experience is good only believe this because they have never known anything else. The author also explicitly states
So that’s the dialectic here. I want people to not have to know about tech stuff. I’m not into the tech-for-tech’s-sake lifestyle. I want it to be easy to use. You just tell the computer what you want and it happens, no need to point and click, let alone configure and make. That’d be great. And hackers and modders could add features and share them and everyone would benefit.
But it’sgotto be free, free for reals. Open source, and either decentralized or democratically governed.
The author, I think, is saying that while user experience is a nice goal to pursue, it means nothing if it isn’t open source, and you can’t go around the carefully-crafted VC-funded fancy-but-restrictive UX if you have the skills to do so. Perhaps it is a reach to say that the author prioritizes open source over good user experience, but I don’t think so, and even from the most pessimistic reading of those two paragraphs the author views them as at least equal.
you quoted but reworded (why?).
I quoted and reworded it because I was on mobile and couldn’t copy paste from your comment without a lot of hassle, and didn’t want to retype everything you had typed word for word. Didn’t mean anything by it.
I think they addressed that point pretty clearly. The author says that just because the user experience of sticking your hand into your kitchen and instantly receiving food is fantastic, doesn’t mean that letting someone you don’t know live in your kitchen and only eating what they decide to make you is a good solution, especially since it means you couldn’t use your kitchen (which I believe is a metaphor for your smartphone) for anything else even if you wanted to. Further, those who believe it’s a good solution because it is free and its user experience is good only believe this because they have never known anything else. The author also explicitly states
The author, I think, is saying that while user experience is a nice goal to pursue, it means nothing if it isn’t open source, and you can’t go around the carefully-crafted VC-funded fancy-but-restrictive UX if you have the skills to do so. Perhaps it is a reach to say that the author prioritizes open source over good user experience, but I don’t think so, and even from the most pessimistic reading of those two paragraphs the author views them as at least equal.
I quoted and reworded it because I was on mobile and couldn’t copy paste from your comment without a lot of hassle, and didn’t want to retype everything you had typed word for word. Didn’t mean anything by it.