At the very least, forcing users to learn something new can hardly be considered a usability improvement.
That assumes that users really need to learn things. The best UIs are often those that match intuitively with our preexisting intuitions about the world. It's not quite that simple, but I definitely think a good UI designer can exploit a lot of our natural understanding of time and space and simple mechanics to make an interface that requires very little learning.
3D file managers are like powerpoint presentations with lots of animations and noises.
I generally agree with this, though. There are 3D elements that are useful (e.g. visual cues like drop shadows that give you a sense of depth between windows that are stacked above each other), but generally the attempts I've seen to make 3D GUIs haven't worked very well.
I wouldn't call it astroturfing-- not exactly. These things are fed by Apple's leaks, and it's fairly intentional on Apple's part. It was reported that Apple knew one of their competitors was going to release a tablet (Microsoft?) and leaked information about their own tablet to steal the news cycle.
However, Apple doesn't really need to feed these things. Apple fans do it to themselves to some extent. Even back in the 90s when Apple was falling apart, Mac fans were tracking the company's progress closely and freaking out about every possible move. Also, there are various business interests involved. News sites want views. There was a video a while back where Jim Cramer talked about starting fake Apple rumors to manipulate stock prices, and surely that sort of stuff plays into all this. They're maniacs.
There's also (sorry, but it needs to be acknowledged) a valid component to Apple hype. Apple is an innovative company, they release cool products, and they drive technology trends. You might not think they're *that* innovative, but compared to companies like Dell and HP, they really are.
No problem with that. You should already be able to do that with a 3rd party plugin.
Sorry, I was thinking in terms of the whole thread, starting with, "You can't use it in firefox because mozilla refuses to support H.264". Mozilla isn't going to bundle h264 support in the browser, but it's not an open-source/closed-source problem and it has nothing to do with your willingness to pay. It has to do with their unwillingness to pay a licensing fee per download.
Mozilla could rely on 3rd party plug-ins, or they could do what Apple does in Safari and basically pass decoding duties back to the OS, thereby avoiding responsibility for deciding which codecs to support. Either of those seem reasonable to me.
ome earlier posters suggested that b/c VLC's implemention of h264 was cleanroom, it wouldn't be subject to the original patent. This, I believe, confuses patent and copyright. Cleanroom engineering avoids copyright suits. A patent is about a *method* for solving a problem...
Right. AFAIK (admittedly IANAL) you have to pay patent licensing fees even if you come up with the same method independently. Otherwise, patent enforcement would require that you prove the offender wasn't simply ignorant of your work, and that would be very difficult to prove.
Theoretically, if they could develop a decoder which didn't use the patented methods, then no licensing fee would be necessary. Without knowing what the patents actually cover, I'm still going to guess that it would be very difficult or impossible to do that.
Well essentially you probably did pay some kind of a licensing fee, but it's just hidden. Everyone who has bought Windows 7 or OSX has paid the fee in a fairly direct manner: you pay Apple or Microsoft, and they pay the fee. It's a little trickier with Google, but essentially you've paid via ad-views.
But that's not the problem, really. It's not exactly that you, as a user, pay for a licensing fee once and then you're covered for any h264 decoder you want to use. I believe the licensing fee is directed at software developers and they have to pay for each copy of the decoder that they distribute. Therefore, whenever someone downloads Firefox, Mozilla would have to pay some fee. Linux distributions, assuming they included a decoder, would also have to pay a fee. Now theoretically they could also work out some kind of an alternative licensing deal, but still, they would have to be the ones to paying patent licensing fees. Since they don't make money for each copy they distribute, this would present a problem for cash-strapped open source projects.
Sure, it'll probably piss off users even more... (And I'm the first to admit I'd be pissed off by such an approach too).
Yeah, I'll admit that I chose the password requirements for my own network, and I still get completely confused when it comes time to change my password. Windows won't tell you what the requirements are, but instead just says, "Your password doesn't meet the requirements." I'll make a 12 character password with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols and it will still come back and say, "sorry, that password doesn't meet the requirements." Drives me nuts, but I don't force password rotation very often, so I never get around to finding a good fix.
I'd say h.264 is a pretty good option with better support.
And the main issue with the "better support" is hardware support. If you want to distribute HD video in a format with no hardware support on consumer chipsets, it's going to require a lot more general processing power. This means set-top boxes will need to be more powerful, as will portable players. Also, portable players will need much bigger batteries because all that processing power is going to eat your battery life.
That seems to be the big issue, that hardware vendors are already supporting h264 as their de facto standard. If you want Theora to be a viable alternative, then someone has to convince the hardware vendors to include support. Now you run into the chicken-and-the-egg problem of getting hardware vendors to support a format that no one uses, which they won't do unless people are already using it. Meanwhile you can't get people to use it because there's no hardware support.
Because the problem isn't the openness of the code, it's the licensing fees required for creating an h264 decoder. There are already an open source h264 decoder that you can download, but legally someone is supposed to be paying a licensing fee.
So the problem is this: Should Firefox include something in their browser that will require them to pay a licensing fee for each copy they distribute? Will that then mean that Linux distributions will drop Firefox as the default browser anyway?
to show their Theora video which is clearly missing 2-3 generations in video codec development compared to H264?...Google, a multi billion giant can roll out a good "quicktime interface" for youtube...but it doesn't really mean HTML5 with codecs which nobody can agree will crush Flash... keep testing Theora and sorry to say...
Sorry for the whacky quoting, but I'm just trying to highlight that a few parts of your post seem to imply that Google should be weary about pushing strange formats, but that's not really what's going on anyway. Youtube basically uses h264 encoding for their video right now, and then it plays those videos using Flash as its video player. What the move to HTML does is that is gives you the same h264 encoding, but leaves it up to your browser how to play it. If your browser has a decoder built into it, it can decode the video itself. The browser can also pass the video through to your operating system's default decoder.
Huh. Why is it that VLC can get away with distributing an h264 decoder but Mozilla can't? Sorry for my ignorance here, but I never thought about it before. Is it because they're not operating in the US? Does it matter if they have mirrors located in the US? Can Mozilla exploit the same loopholes?
Part of the problem is that h264 licensing fees are generally hidden. You don't pay for a license, your hardware/software vendor does. Apple and Microsoft and Google all buy the licenses for you and include them in their products. It's hard to convey the importance of the licenses for non-free codecs if they seem to be free.
Most video chipsets these days are including hardware support for H264 decoding. This includes the chipsets in devices like mobile phones, MP3 (portable media) players, and set-top boxes.
I don't know about you, but I've probably got 100 different passwords rattling around in my brain.
Yeah, I've begun to think that we should really implement some kind of a universal public key system to take care of this problem. Instead of trying to keep a different password for every service you use, you would only have 1 private key to manage.
A good enough system should also be able to cut back on things like identity theft. I've run into too many companies and government organizations who treat "knowing your social security number" as a valid form of identification and authorization.
..it must be EXACTLY 2 letters, followed by EXACTLY 4 digits.
That's retarded.
I've thought about this sort of thing before, where password policies also have the effect of narrowing the number of possible passwords. For example, it's pretty standard for a company to have a policy like, "Your password must be at least 10 characters, contain at least one capital letter and one lower case letter, contain at least 1 number and one non-alpha-numeric character." And yes, it's true that keeping these policies has the effect of increasing the number of combinations, but it also is simultaneously narrowing the combinations.
If a hacker knows this policy and were to try a brute-force attack, they would be able to disregard any possible passwords made of 7 characters or less. They would be able to get rid of all combinations that were all lower-case, all upper-case, or even all alphanumeric. I haven't done the math and I'm sure that requiring some of these things are still a net gain, but it struck me as funny. Like if someone were to try a very clever brute-force attack that didn't bother trying all-alphanumeric passwords, then "password" would in that case be a safer password than "*pQQ\K6"XSiM". It might take him a million years to get to "*pQQ\K6"XSiM", but he'd never try "password".
Google, on the other hand, is threatening Apple in its biggest growth market: mobile devices.
Let's not forget that Microsoft also has a phone OS, owns Danger, and has announced that they plan on releasing a Microsoft-branded phone in the next year.
(indeed, Office on a Mac is much nicer than Office on a PC.)
That may be your opinion, but they still use Entourage which still doesn't have full Exchange support. I don't know how Microsoft could more blatantly trying to trash the viability of Office for OSX in the corporate world than to hobble Exchange support.
Microsoft dropped Exchange support right around the advent of OSX, which was right around the same time they stopped developing IE for Mac, which was also around the time that Apple started to make their comeback. So when you look at it that way, it looks like Microsoft propped up a minor competitor when they were being prosecuted for antitrust violations only to drop support when that competitor stopped being so minor.
Even now, none of Microsoft's Mac software adheres to Mac conventions. They do crap like stick their configuration files into your "Documents" folder. Now supposedly they're going to start offering Outlook for Mac in the next year, but we'll see how that turns out.
In fairness, he didn't really say that privacy didn't matter. When his quote is taken in context, I think it's pretty clear that he's just pointing out that you can't rely on search engines to guarantee your privacy:
If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
What seemed to draw attention was that during the same interview, he said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Ultimately I don't think that such a statement is very threatening or judgmental. He's suggesting that if *you* are ashamed of your actions, the perhaps you should stop acting that way. Now it may be outside the scope of his duties as Google CEO to be providing that kind of advice, but then again, it is in the context of pointing out how the Internet isn't a very secure place and your privacy isn't guaranteed. What's more, it's not terrible advice.
On the other hand, if FLOSS developers really want to steal users from their proprietary counterparts, then they may want to listen to the jerks' requests, too.
See, I don't think you can make blanket statements like that for either FLOSS or Closed developers.
What blanket statement? That they may want to listen to users if they wish to increase their user base, even in cases where those users are jerks? It's a very conditional statement, saying, "if your goal is X, you may want to do Y." It's far from a strong statement, and I think it's pretty reasonable.
Some FLOSS folks are very good at listening to and understanding their audiences...
Nowhere did I say that FLOSS developers never listened to their users, nor did I say that they generally don't. I don't think I even implied that they didn't. I was just suggesting a different perspective on what you were saying, and I don't think it was a very offensive or controversial one.
So wait, just for clarification, you're suggesting that every valid request made to open source projects gets addressed quickly and thoroughly to the satisfaction of the requestor?
I'm trying to work out just what it is that you're claiming, but that seems to be it. You don't seem to even be willing to entertain the possibility that some valid and polite requests, made under appropriate circumstances, ever go unanswered.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter to my point. Even if you ignore requests to spite the "jerks" who make their requests improperly, you're still probably losing users. And as I said, I think that's perfectly fine... unless you want lots of people to use your software. On the other hand, if FLOSS developers really want to steal users from their proprietary counterparts, then they may want to listen to the jerks' requests, too.
Because if I was going to unscientifically guess at the number of times I go to Google News and don't see any headlines that garner my interest enough to click, ~50% would have been it.
The question is, then, how many users do you count as? The article seems to claim that 50% of users just don't actually read any articles. Presumably the remaining 50% don't read every article but read articles sometimes. So if you visit Google News multiple times and 50% of the time don't read any articles, do you count as a single visitor who reads articles sometimes, or does each visit count you as a "user" and some of those users never read articles?
Ah, who knows? Lies, damned lies, and statistics...
My guess is that the newspapers that switch to a "pay model" are going to try...
Well to me this raises a bunch of other potential problems for the for-pay newspaper market. What are the chances that you can get people to pay for the ability to read your articles if they're not even willing to read them when they're free? People can get "Brown wins in Massachusetts" for free-- you can't copyright that information. If people don't want to RTFA, then the newspapers don't have a business. There's no way around it.
I don't think you get this whole Open Source thing. If you don't like it for a good reason, then many others won't either.
That's not necessarily the case. I might have different needs the "most people". No, a closed source vendor won't necessarily support my niche needs either, but my only point was that the ability to make my own patches or fork a project is only an advantage if I have the resources to do that.
But there are lots of common complaints about open source projects that don't get fixed. Claim they're not "valid" if you like, but users still won't use your project if you don't address their "invalid" complaints and closed source products do.
That's fair, but it's also worth keeping in mind that "Fork it if you don't like it" is only better than a closed source product if you have the resources and expertise to fork it. Otherwise, you're just as helpless.
Beyond that, the software that will eventually replace the old DOS-based crap you're talking about will be whatever meets the businesses'/users' needs. If you'd like to see that be your FOSS project rather than a proprietary solution, then paying attention to user requests might be helpful.
If you don't care whether your project gets used... well I guess users have no leverage unless they want to pay you, and maybe not even then.
Slashdot Mirror
At the very least, forcing users to learn something new can hardly be considered a usability improvement.
That assumes that users really need to learn things. The best UIs are often those that match intuitively with our preexisting intuitions about the world. It's not quite that simple, but I definitely think a good UI designer can exploit a lot of our natural understanding of time and space and simple mechanics to make an interface that requires very little learning.
3D file managers are like powerpoint presentations with lots of animations and noises.
I generally agree with this, though. There are 3D elements that are useful (e.g. visual cues like drop shadows that give you a sense of depth between windows that are stacked above each other), but generally the attempts I've seen to make 3D GUIs haven't worked very well.
I wouldn't call it astroturfing-- not exactly. These things are fed by Apple's leaks, and it's fairly intentional on Apple's part. It was reported that Apple knew one of their competitors was going to release a tablet (Microsoft?) and leaked information about their own tablet to steal the news cycle.
However, Apple doesn't really need to feed these things. Apple fans do it to themselves to some extent. Even back in the 90s when Apple was falling apart, Mac fans were tracking the company's progress closely and freaking out about every possible move. Also, there are various business interests involved. News sites want views. There was a video a while back where Jim Cramer talked about starting fake Apple rumors to manipulate stock prices, and surely that sort of stuff plays into all this. They're maniacs.
There's also (sorry, but it needs to be acknowledged) a valid component to Apple hype. Apple is an innovative company, they release cool products, and they drive technology trends. You might not think they're *that* innovative, but compared to companies like Dell and HP, they really are.
No problem with that. You should already be able to do that with a 3rd party plugin.
Sorry, I was thinking in terms of the whole thread, starting with, "You can't use it in firefox because mozilla refuses to support H.264". Mozilla isn't going to bundle h264 support in the browser, but it's not an open-source/closed-source problem and it has nothing to do with your willingness to pay. It has to do with their unwillingness to pay a licensing fee per download.
Mozilla could rely on 3rd party plug-ins, or they could do what Apple does in Safari and basically pass decoding duties back to the OS, thereby avoiding responsibility for deciding which codecs to support. Either of those seem reasonable to me.
ome earlier posters suggested that b/c VLC's implemention of h264 was cleanroom, it wouldn't be subject to the original patent. This, I believe, confuses patent and copyright. Cleanroom engineering avoids copyright suits. A patent is about a *method* for solving a problem...
Right. AFAIK (admittedly IANAL) you have to pay patent licensing fees even if you come up with the same method independently. Otherwise, patent enforcement would require that you prove the offender wasn't simply ignorant of your work, and that would be very difficult to prove.
Theoretically, if they could develop a decoder which didn't use the patented methods, then no licensing fee would be necessary. Without knowing what the patents actually cover, I'm still going to guess that it would be very difficult or impossible to do that.
Well essentially you probably did pay some kind of a licensing fee, but it's just hidden. Everyone who has bought Windows 7 or OSX has paid the fee in a fairly direct manner: you pay Apple or Microsoft, and they pay the fee. It's a little trickier with Google, but essentially you've paid via ad-views.
But that's not the problem, really. It's not exactly that you, as a user, pay for a licensing fee once and then you're covered for any h264 decoder you want to use. I believe the licensing fee is directed at software developers and they have to pay for each copy of the decoder that they distribute. Therefore, whenever someone downloads Firefox, Mozilla would have to pay some fee. Linux distributions, assuming they included a decoder, would also have to pay a fee. Now theoretically they could also work out some kind of an alternative licensing deal, but still, they would have to be the ones to paying patent licensing fees. Since they don't make money for each copy they distribute, this would present a problem for cash-strapped open source projects.
Sure, it'll probably piss off users even more... (And I'm the first to admit I'd be pissed off by such an approach too).
Yeah, I'll admit that I chose the password requirements for my own network, and I still get completely confused when it comes time to change my password. Windows won't tell you what the requirements are, but instead just says, "Your password doesn't meet the requirements." I'll make a 12 character password with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols and it will still come back and say, "sorry, that password doesn't meet the requirements." Drives me nuts, but I don't force password rotation very often, so I never get around to finding a good fix.
I'd say h.264 is a pretty good option with better support.
And the main issue with the "better support" is hardware support. If you want to distribute HD video in a format with no hardware support on consumer chipsets, it's going to require a lot more general processing power. This means set-top boxes will need to be more powerful, as will portable players. Also, portable players will need much bigger batteries because all that processing power is going to eat your battery life.
That seems to be the big issue, that hardware vendors are already supporting h264 as their de facto standard. If you want Theora to be a viable alternative, then someone has to convince the hardware vendors to include support. Now you run into the chicken-and-the-egg problem of getting hardware vendors to support a format that no one uses, which they won't do unless people are already using it. Meanwhile you can't get people to use it because there's no hardware support.
Because the problem isn't the openness of the code, it's the licensing fees required for creating an h264 decoder. There are already an open source h264 decoder that you can download, but legally someone is supposed to be paying a licensing fee.
So the problem is this: Should Firefox include something in their browser that will require them to pay a licensing fee for each copy they distribute? Will that then mean that Linux distributions will drop Firefox as the default browser anyway?
to show their Theora video which is clearly missing 2-3 generations in video codec development compared to H264?...Google, a multi billion giant can roll out a good "quicktime interface" for youtube...but it doesn't really mean HTML5 with codecs which nobody can agree will crush Flash... keep testing Theora and sorry to say...
Sorry for the whacky quoting, but I'm just trying to highlight that a few parts of your post seem to imply that Google should be weary about pushing strange formats, but that's not really what's going on anyway. Youtube basically uses h264 encoding for their video right now, and then it plays those videos using Flash as its video player. What the move to HTML does is that is gives you the same h264 encoding, but leaves it up to your browser how to play it. If your browser has a decoder built into it, it can decode the video itself. The browser can also pass the video through to your operating system's default decoder.
Huh. Why is it that VLC can get away with distributing an h264 decoder but Mozilla can't? Sorry for my ignorance here, but I never thought about it before. Is it because they're not operating in the US? Does it matter if they have mirrors located in the US? Can Mozilla exploit the same loopholes?
Part of the problem is that h264 licensing fees are generally hidden. You don't pay for a license, your hardware/software vendor does. Apple and Microsoft and Google all buy the licenses for you and include them in their products. It's hard to convey the importance of the licenses for non-free codecs if they seem to be free.
Most video chipsets these days are including hardware support for H264 decoding. This includes the chipsets in devices like mobile phones, MP3 (portable media) players, and set-top boxes.
Yeah, like I said, I'm sure it's a net gain in terms of security even without having done the math. Still, it strikes me as funny.
I don't know about you, but I've probably got 100 different passwords rattling around in my brain.
Yeah, I've begun to think that we should really implement some kind of a universal public key system to take care of this problem. Instead of trying to keep a different password for every service you use, you would only have 1 private key to manage.
A good enough system should also be able to cut back on things like identity theft. I've run into too many companies and government organizations who treat "knowing your social security number" as a valid form of identification and authorization.
Of course, that's easier said than done.
..it must be EXACTLY 2 letters, followed by EXACTLY 4 digits.
That's retarded.
I've thought about this sort of thing before, where password policies also have the effect of narrowing the number of possible passwords. For example, it's pretty standard for a company to have a policy like, "Your password must be at least 10 characters, contain at least one capital letter and one lower case letter, contain at least 1 number and one non-alpha-numeric character." And yes, it's true that keeping these policies has the effect of increasing the number of combinations, but it also is simultaneously narrowing the combinations.
If a hacker knows this policy and were to try a brute-force attack, they would be able to disregard any possible passwords made of 7 characters or less. They would be able to get rid of all combinations that were all lower-case, all upper-case, or even all alphanumeric. I haven't done the math and I'm sure that requiring some of these things are still a net gain, but it struck me as funny. Like if someone were to try a very clever brute-force attack that didn't bother trying all-alphanumeric passwords, then "password" would in that case be a safer password than "*pQQ\K6"XSiM". It might take him a million years to get to "*pQQ\K6"XSiM", but he'd never try "password".
Google, on the other hand, is threatening Apple in its biggest growth market: mobile devices.
Let's not forget that Microsoft also has a phone OS, owns Danger, and has announced that they plan on releasing a Microsoft-branded phone in the next year.
(indeed, Office on a Mac is much nicer than Office on a PC.)
That may be your opinion, but they still use Entourage which still doesn't have full Exchange support. I don't know how Microsoft could more blatantly trying to trash the viability of Office for OSX in the corporate world than to hobble Exchange support.
Microsoft dropped Exchange support right around the advent of OSX, which was right around the same time they stopped developing IE for Mac, which was also around the time that Apple started to make their comeback. So when you look at it that way, it looks like Microsoft propped up a minor competitor when they were being prosecuted for antitrust violations only to drop support when that competitor stopped being so minor.
Even now, none of Microsoft's Mac software adheres to Mac conventions. They do crap like stick their configuration files into your "Documents" folder. Now supposedly they're going to start offering Outlook for Mac in the next year, but we'll see how that turns out.
Google CEO says privacy doesn't matter
In fairness, he didn't really say that privacy didn't matter. When his quote is taken in context, I think it's pretty clear that he's just pointing out that you can't rely on search engines to guarantee your privacy:
If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
What seemed to draw attention was that during the same interview, he said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Ultimately I don't think that such a statement is very threatening or judgmental. He's suggesting that if *you* are ashamed of your actions, the perhaps you should stop acting that way. Now it may be outside the scope of his duties as Google CEO to be providing that kind of advice, but then again, it is in the context of pointing out how the Internet isn't a very secure place and your privacy isn't guaranteed. What's more, it's not terrible advice.
On the other hand, if FLOSS developers really want to steal users from their proprietary counterparts, then they may want to listen to the jerks' requests, too.
See, I don't think you can make blanket statements like that for either FLOSS or Closed developers.
What blanket statement? That they may want to listen to users if they wish to increase their user base, even in cases where those users are jerks? It's a very conditional statement, saying, "if your goal is X, you may want to do Y." It's far from a strong statement, and I think it's pretty reasonable.
Some FLOSS folks are very good at listening to and understanding their audiences...
Nowhere did I say that FLOSS developers never listened to their users, nor did I say that they generally don't. I don't think I even implied that they didn't. I was just suggesting a different perspective on what you were saying, and I don't think it was a very offensive or controversial one.
Finally, I note that you didn't share your first hand experience even after I requested it. Should I infer that you have none?
You should infer that I'm trying to avoid arguing pointlessly with people who won't listen.
So wait, just for clarification, you're suggesting that every valid request made to open source projects gets addressed quickly and thoroughly to the satisfaction of the requestor?
I'm trying to work out just what it is that you're claiming, but that seems to be it. You don't seem to even be willing to entertain the possibility that some valid and polite requests, made under appropriate circumstances, ever go unanswered.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter to my point. Even if you ignore requests to spite the "jerks" who make their requests improperly, you're still probably losing users. And as I said, I think that's perfectly fine... unless you want lots of people to use your software. On the other hand, if FLOSS developers really want to steal users from their proprietary counterparts, then they may want to listen to the jerks' requests, too.
Because if I was going to unscientifically guess at the number of times I go to Google News and don't see any headlines that garner my interest enough to click, ~50% would have been it.
The question is, then, how many users do you count as? The article seems to claim that 50% of users just don't actually read any articles. Presumably the remaining 50% don't read every article but read articles sometimes. So if you visit Google News multiple times and 50% of the time don't read any articles, do you count as a single visitor who reads articles sometimes, or does each visit count you as a "user" and some of those users never read articles?
Ah, who knows? Lies, damned lies, and statistics...
My guess is that the newspapers that switch to a "pay model" are going to try...
Well to me this raises a bunch of other potential problems for the for-pay newspaper market. What are the chances that you can get people to pay for the ability to read your articles if they're not even willing to read them when they're free? People can get "Brown wins in Massachusetts" for free-- you can't copyright that information. If people don't want to RTFA, then the newspapers don't have a business. There's no way around it.
I don't think you get this whole Open Source thing. If you don't like it for a good reason, then many others won't either.
That's not necessarily the case. I might have different needs the "most people". No, a closed source vendor won't necessarily support my niche needs either, but my only point was that the ability to make my own patches or fork a project is only an advantage if I have the resources to do that.
But there are lots of common complaints about open source projects that don't get fixed. Claim they're not "valid" if you like, but users still won't use your project if you don't address their "invalid" complaints and closed source products do.
That's fair, but it's also worth keeping in mind that "Fork it if you don't like it" is only better than a closed source product if you have the resources and expertise to fork it. Otherwise, you're just as helpless.
Beyond that, the software that will eventually replace the old DOS-based crap you're talking about will be whatever meets the businesses'/users' needs. If you'd like to see that be your FOSS project rather than a proprietary solution, then paying attention to user requests might be helpful.
If you don't care whether your project gets used... well I guess users have no leverage unless they want to pay you, and maybe not even then.