Command Wiki: Personal Development Intentions

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If I personally start this project, it will definitely have to go through one or two iterations of experimental development first, so I can learn the ropes. The full version of this application is too large a project for one individual to develop. I will have to see how it pans out personally.

I am not upset by people trying to build something like this. My advice is to not do it yourself if you are not actually in love with the idea itself, as opposed to seeing a way to charge for plugins or chop the application up.

Messages can be sent to this blog to consult about its ideas if so desired. I am trying to make enough sense about it to transmit its vision.

Not For or Against Money

I personally see this application as an idea that should have existed twenty years ago.

My take on it is that it must be designed without any conception of a goal to make money off of it.

But that is for the sake of design focus. It has nothing to do with a statement about how evil money is - or how superior free stuff is.

I do however believe that some things are really not meant for the context of today's software world, because they will likely get ruined and enshitified in that world. My bet is that if this idea were to be used to make money in today's context, then it would most likely get enshitified. (Spellcheck doesn't like that word.)

General FLOSS Paid Software

This was not the intention of this post, but it brings me back to a soapbox about general FLOSS success.

General success of FLOSS is about extending FLOSS values out into good design intent - lack of manipulation of users - user privacy - user respect.

One way to put it is that in today's world, there are few software application sales systems that carry these values to fruition. So, what does that mean? Some might say it means that just trying to reasonably sell software in a straight forward manner has become untenable.

But the counter could also make a lot of sense, in that people would flock to a particular software store, because it has a different set of standards they value, that set if apart as a whole sense of shared values. On an individual application basis, it's harder to attract the right attention. But if a store focuses on those values as a whole, then it will have a greater chance.

Such a store would need a core manifesto of sorts, and build trust on issues that define the system.

Does it Require a Solution?

Sell an application.

The application is not a funnel of manipulation. The application does things.

The application is not chopped up into bits. That's why it's an effective tool to get things done.

The application brings peace of mind.

We live in a cynical cynical world.

The Solution

An environment has to be just that: an environment. People need to be able to go to a software store environment, because they value non-manipulative software - or the store environment gives you the ability to know what kind of manipulation or non-manipulation is in the future if you engage with that application. You could at least sort applications by payment method.

Now, that does not mean that it's easy to accommodate FLOSS values in software sales. But it is something like a way to get users to gather to a particular store, as opposed to other stores. So in that way, it's a starting point.