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Open source is great for tech-savvy professionals. Pick what you like, change it if you want, and it will never be taken away from you. Open source has complet

by api 6y ago

Open source is great for tech-savvy professionals. Pick what you like, change it if you want, and it will never be taken away from you. Open source has completely and consistently failed in the consumer market, and its adoption in the enterprise market has been mixed. In those markets users are either not knowledgeable enough or too busy to do the things open source asks of them. Syncthing is cherry picked as an example in the original article because it's very atypical for open source. For open source it has a superb degree of polish and is quite easy to use. Still I wonder how it would fare in a professional environment. How do I invite someone to syncthing the way I can with dropbox? How do I integrate it with my corporate management or IAM solution? How do I...? I assume there would be a long tail of weaknesses. I also wonder what happens if syncthing gets abandoned or needs to undergo some major redesign to cope with some significant change to UI technology, OSes, or platforms. Who will do that? Don't get me wrong. I like that syncthing exists and even that it lacks those features, but I also realize that it does not address the whole market and probably never will. Open source as it stands has some fairly significant limits. BTW the pathology described in this article is also seen in open source projects vying for mindshare, adoption, contributors, sponsorship, etc. It's not specific to commercial software. I do agree that it's more prevalent in commercial software because companies need to find a steady source of revenue, but it's gotten worse in recent years because nobody pays for the most basic core features of software that they want anymore. People only pay for fluff, or pay if they're wrangled into a closed ecosystem and then brought to the point of payment via some kind of dark pattern. You get what you pay for, and people no longer pay for just good software.

yogthos 6y ago
It's worth noting that open source isn't directly at odds with commercial funding. There are lots of open source products out there like Android, GitLab, Nextcloud, IntelliJ,and many others that are developed commercially, but also have an open source core. I think that's a good model since it ensures that the project has funding for full time development and polish, while also leaving the option for the users to take the source and fork it if the product goes in a direction they don't like. Another approach is open source foundations like Firefox or Linux foundation, and donations funded projects like Mastodon. All of these are solid and polished pieces of software. If syncthing got abandoned then the source is still going to be there, and if there's a community of users around it then development can be picked up by somebody else. This happens all the time in open source world. I already gave GNOME as an example of a project where the original project went in a directions users didn't agree with, and now there are forks of it with Mate and Cinnamon that went their own way. Meanwhile, if syncthing was a closed source product and the company went under, that would be the end of it definitively. The users would be hung out to dry, and there would be no possibility to adapt it to new OSes, or platforms. It would just be dead. And syncthing is clearly meant for use cases where you're sharing files between personal devices. However, Nextcloud is a great answer for professional environment. In fact it's so great that German Federal Administration relies on it https://nextcloud.com/blog/german-federal-administration-relies-on-nextcloud-as-a-secure-file-exchange-solution/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/german-federal-administration-rel... So, I don't actually see any significant limits in open source compared to commercial software. There are some trade offs, but open source has certainly been demonstrated to work well in a very wide variety of environments including enterprise and consumer products. And the core point here is that open source leaves uses with more options than commercial software. Yes, projects can move in new directions, become abandoned, and so on. However, there is at least the possibility of users being able to keep using the version of the project they like, and that's what's missing with closed source software.

by api 6y ago

yogthos 6y ago

It's worth noting that open source isn't directly at odds with commercial funding. There are lots of open source products out there like Android, GitLab, Nextcloud, IntelliJ,and many others that are developed commercially, but also have an open source core. I think that's a good model since it ensures that the project has funding for full time development and polish, while also leaving the option for the users to take the source and fork it if the product goes in a direction they don't like. Another approach is open source foundations like Firefox or Linux foundation, and donations funded projects like Mastodon. All of these are solid and polished pieces of software. If syncthing got abandoned then the source is still going to be there, and if there's a community of users around it then development can be picked up by somebody else. This happens all the time in open source world. I already gave GNOME as an example of a project where the original project went in a directions users didn't agree with, and now there are forks of it with Mate and Cinnamon that went their own way. Meanwhile, if syncthing was a closed source product and the company went under, that would be the end of it definitively. The users would be hung out to dry, and there would be no possibility to adapt it to new OSes, or platforms. It would just be dead. And syncthing is clearly meant for use cases where you're sharing files between personal devices. However, Nextcloud is a great answer for professional environment. In fact it's so great that German Federal Administration relies on it https://nextcloud.com/blog/german-federal-administration-relies-on-nextcloud-as-a-secure-file-exchange-solution/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/german-federal-administration-rel... So, I don't actually see any significant limits in open source compared to commercial software. There are some trade offs, but open source has certainly been demonstrated to work well in a very wide variety of environments including enterprise and consumer products. And the core point here is that open source leaves uses with more options than commercial software. Yes, projects can move in new directions, become abandoned, and so on. However, there is at least the possibility of users being able to keep using the version of the project they like, and that's what's missing with closed source software.