There is absolutely room for improvement in the culture of FOSS, and absolutely a gaping hole of UI/UX focus that I don't think anyone except the most deranged "hrm just recompile the kernel, I did it three times already today" forks would argue. But my dude is not the guy to fix this. He has no answers, just complaints.
I think what he's missing is that most FOSS development goes unfunded or underfunded; complaining about it is like complaining that the local soup kitchen doesn't offer paleo options. Feel free to roll up your sleeves and get to cooking, my dude.
My personal FOSS project isn't in public beta yet, but when I'm reading the docs and forums for other people's software, it's absolutely astonishing how entitled some people are. They show up being pissed that this thing you made for yourself in your spare time and then decided to very kindly release into the world for anyone to use and improve isn't tailored to their needs or running on their particular goofy ass rig (it's amazing that people can buy a whole ass Chromebook and then ask if you can run something like Blender on it and get mad when you tell em you can't without doing chroot or whatever the current way of getting Linux up and running on it is.)
He's right about the community as a whole being less than enthusiastic about inclusivity, but he doesn't actually sound like the guy to fix that either. And that problem is tons more complicated to solve than he probably understands it to be.
But in the same way you can fork a project and fix it and submit it to be merged into the main branch, he could also do what I did and take his ass to the developing world to see how to fix that problem too. If he did, he'd probably discover that people outside the global North-centric tech culture are more than used to solving problems without help and that us middle aged middle class white guys have more to learn from them about working around limitations and solving problems than we do to teach them. That's my experience anyway.
I think what he's missing is that most FOSS development goes unfunded or underfunded; complaining about it is like complaining that the local soup kitchen doesn't offer paleo options. Feel free to roll up your sleeves and get to cooking, my dude.
My personal FOSS project isn't in public beta yet, but when I'm reading the docs and forums for other people's software, it's absolutely astonishing how entitled some people are. They show up being pissed that this thing you made for yourself in your spare time and then decided to very kindly release into the world for anyone to use and improve isn't tailored to their needs or running on their particular goofy ass rig (it's amazing that people can buy a whole ass Chromebook and then ask if you can run something like Blender on it and get mad when you tell em you can't without doing chroot or whatever the current way of getting Linux up and running on it is.)
He's right about the community as a whole being less than enthusiastic about inclusivity, but he doesn't actually sound like the guy to fix that either. And that problem is tons more complicated to solve than he probably understands it to be.
But in the same way you can fork a project and fix it and submit it to be merged into the main branch, he could also do what I did and take his ass to the developing world to see how to fix that problem too. If he did, he'd probably discover that people outside the global North-centric tech culture are more than used to solving problems without help and that us middle aged middle class white guys have more to learn from them about working around limitations and solving problems than we do to teach them. That's my experience anyway.