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I don't think anything you wrote refutes what you quoted. Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for soft

I don't think anything you wrote refutes what you quoted. Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. And many if not most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. There are a lot more people who run apt-get install than open up pull requests. It's why Stack Overflow has more MAUs than GitHub. Freeware has been around since the beginning of software, open source is a more scalable way of doing it.

yardie 8y ago
That is certainly one interpretation of it. Most of the opensource projects I'm familiar with don't compete directly with a proprietary model. > Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. That hasn't been the case for most projects I see. Most developers can afford to pay for proprietary software. Yet they choose to work on opensource, why is that? I can purchase 1 month of Adobe CC with less than 15 minutes of work. Why spend years, months and days developing and debugging an open source image editor? > most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. Most users would pirate the cracked version of the proprietary software (i.e. Photoshop, Windows) rather than use something like GiMP or Ubuntu. If money is the motivation there is a lot less friction in sticking to cracked Windows than opensource ArchLinux. > Freeware has been around since the beginning of software, open source is a more scalable way of doing it. Not sure what this means. Freeware can be put on an FTP server or repo and and downloaded quickly. What is the scaling issue?
SXX 8y ago
> Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. This is just not the case anymore. I know tons of people who choose to work on open source and I pretty sure none of them did it because of money. I guess it's might be like that 25-30+ years ago for the people who started GNU and Linux ecosystems when vendor lock-in was big deal and a lot of programming tools were proprietary and expensive include compilers. And 14 years back when I started to work in web development there was similar situation where a lot of tools and software is proprietary and expensive. Not anymore. > And many if not most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. For initial adoption this is still true, but I believe many people who stick with open source products doing it for entirely different reasons. As others pointed out it's might be not the case in rich 1st world countries, but everywhere else people just go with illegal software instead of open source.

yardie 8y ago

That is certainly one interpretation of it. Most of the opensource projects I'm familiar with don't compete directly with a proprietary model. > Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. That hasn't been the case for most projects I see. Most developers can afford to pay for proprietary software. Yet they choose to work on opensource, why is that? I can purchase 1 month of Adobe CC with less than 15 minutes of work. Why spend years, months and days developing and debugging an open source image editor? > most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. Most users would pirate the cracked version of the proprietary software (i.e. Photoshop, Windows) rather than use something like GiMP or Ubuntu. If money is the motivation there is a lot less friction in sticking to cracked Windows than opensource ArchLinux. > Freeware has been around since the beginning of software, open source is a more scalable way of doing it. Not sure what this means. Freeware can be put on an FTP server or repo and and downloaded quickly. What is the scaling issue?

SXX 8y ago

> Certainly many contributors to open source projects have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software. This is just not the case anymore. I know tons of people who choose to work on open source and I pretty sure none of them did it because of money. I guess it's might be like that 25-30+ years ago for the people who started GNU and Linux ecosystems when vendor lock-in was big deal and a lot of programming tools were proprietary and expensive include compilers. And 14 years back when I started to work in web development there was similar situation where a lot of tools and software is proprietary and expensive. Not anymore. > And many if not most of the users of open source software have been motivated by not wanting to pay for software as opposed to a desire to read or modify the source code. For initial adoption this is still true, but I believe many people who stick with open source products doing it for entirely different reasons. As others pointed out it's might be not the case in rich 1st world countries, but everywhere else people just go with illegal software instead of open source.