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>Paw is an extremely high quality, native Mac app, made by a small team trying to provide for their families by building software for other software engineers l

by pikzen 10y ago

>Paw is an extremely high quality, native Mac app, made by a small team trying to provide for their families by building software for other software engineers like all of us. It's a paid tool but it's probably the most sophisticated API testing tool that exists. Thing is, most of us don't care. I don't care if Paw engineers aren't selling their software. Just like they shouldn't care if I'm not selling mine. People are not going to stop using software that does 80% of what Paw does (but probably 100% of their needs) because it hurts their feelings. If Product Z is less good than Paw but still fills my needs and is free, Product Z is going to be my choice. Bonus points if it's FOSS. There's also the fact that not all of us work on Mac. I'd love to try out Paw, but unless I see a .deb somewhere, I'm out of luck. So my solution is to grab alternatives. >Check Out Product Z, It's Like Product Y But Free (And Less Good) makes me hate coming to HN. At the other extreme, we have software monoculture. Variety of software is good. Making FOSS software known is good. I'm actually going to go a step further and say that if FOSS software copies pixel for pixel Paw's UI and UX, that is a good thing.

tigershark 10y ago
How copying completely (stealing) the fruit of someone else hard work can ever be a good thing?
- pikzen 10y ago
  Because, in the case of FOSS, that is making good software available to all of humanity. From the $200k SF developer who can afford Paw easily, to the lowly paid eastern European developer, to the broke student. That is of course assuming that the copy is done to have feature parity with the original. Copying solely to surf on the popularity of software while at the same time making it awful is a problem. Also, if you don't want your work copied, don't put it out.
  - tigershark 10y ago
    When someone decides to write some very useful software to sell it and someone else "copies pixel per pixel" the software is simply stealing the original author work. If you want to write your software and release it with an open source license you are perfectly able to do it. If you are simply doing an exact copy "pixel per pixel" of someone else work and releasing it as an open source you are stealing his intellectual property given that the original license is NOT open source. I really love open source, but people that think in this way seriously risk to undermine my trust on the whole OSS model.

by pikzen 10y ago

tigershark 10y ago

How copying completely (stealing) the fruit of someone else hard work can ever be a good thing?

pikzen 10y ago
Because, in the case of FOSS, that is making good software available to all of humanity. From the $200k SF developer who can afford Paw easily, to the lowly paid eastern European developer, to the broke student. That is of course assuming that the copy is done to have feature parity with the original. Copying solely to surf on the popularity of software while at the same time making it awful is a problem. Also, if you don't want your work copied, don't put it out.
- tigershark 10y ago
  When someone decides to write some very useful software to sell it and someone else "copies pixel per pixel" the software is simply stealing the original author work. If you want to write your software and release it with an open source license you are perfectly able to do it. If you are simply doing an exact copy "pixel per pixel" of someone else work and releasing it as an open source you are stealing his intellectual property given that the original license is NOT open source. I really love open source, but people that think in this way seriously risk to undermine my trust on the whole OSS model.