Why are open source projects too rigid and stuck in dogmatic position ?

take for example mastodon, its CEO recently posted a toot asking who has already considered deleting facebook / threads after the recent controversies, but on the other hand ignores that his stubbornness about certain points like not adding quotes just doesn’t make the project appealing for ordinary people, this feature has been the most request since twitter exodus two years ago. and at every surge of new users mastodon struggles to keep them using the platform, why do these projects struggle to acknowledge what people want the most and deliver on it.

another example is LibreOffice, I was trying to get acclimated to this new office suite and was happy to find that I can theme it to my liking to ease up my transition. but it wasn’t long before I found out how tiny dogmatic decision really pushes to give up on it. I found that LO doesn’t auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in “proper English”. line breaks don’t qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.

For people coming from proprietary software that among many short comings still strive to offer the best features and smoothest user experience, it is hard to try and stick to open source projects and even contribute back.

Should big OSS project shift to more democratic structures, where decisions are made based on consensus? or do you think the actual models are fine, and I am an entitled user ??

  • kayazere@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    3 days ago

    Proprietary software is also really dogmatic. Steve Jobs famously didn’t support flash on the iPhone, there also was no direct access to files/file system in the UI for a very long time. Tim Cook told someone’s Mom to just buy an iPhone to access iMessage. There’s too many user hostile dogmatic positions from Apple.

    I think this has nothing to do with open source vs proprietary, but rather specific individuals having power/control over the software to force specific decisions.

    • kekmacska@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      3 days ago

      Sideloading apps to ios is still a huge difficulty. Also, not possible to access a terminal to the underlying system. No way to modify audio output. All of these are basic things on android.