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Partly because devs tend to labour under the misapprehension that: a) pretty much any closed source project or online service can be done just as well by gluin

Partly because devs tend to labour under the misapprehension that: a) pretty much any closed source project or online service can be done just as well by gluing together parts of open source projects… Which may be true in some cases, but the real misapprehension is the final part: b) …and it won't be difficult to do. The classic is the HN comment about Dropbox, but I see at least one comment a week saying something similar. No doubt there are many more.

motles 5y ago
Can you clarify? Like are people saying that Dropbox is easy to replace with OSS? Like ALL it’s functionality?
- brigandish 5y ago
  This is the (in)famous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 though, as I wrote, I don't think it's particularly special, it's just the one that gained notoriety. I actually responded to one just this week, they're rife. The optimism bias is a problem even for programmers.
- tpetry 5y ago
  It‘s a reference to this historic comment when dropbox was first shown on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
sangnoir 5y ago
It's not a misapprehension: selling tools to tool-makers requires that you walk a very fine line. A lot of closed-source tools have pissed off developers enough to be replaced by usually-superior open-source versions, e.g. Git replacing BitKeeper because kernel developers were not happy with BK. Outside of very specialized tools, open source tools tend to attract more contributors and quickly overtake incumbents (see compilers). JetBrains is one of the few companies that bucks the trend, and one I gladly give money to regardless of my increasing VSCode usage. Had Dropbox been marketed at developers only, it would have been a spectacular failure in a world where inotify, rsync, cron and scp already existed.
- pxc 5y ago
  > JetBrains is one of the few companies that bucks the trend, and one I gladly give money to regardless of my increasing VSCode usage. Large parts of IntelliJ are open-source as well, and sometimes they do get used in other open-source editors. Afaict they're pretty good citizens in terms of F/OSS.

motles 5y ago

Can you clarify? Like are people saying that Dropbox is easy to replace with OSS? Like ALL it’s functionality?

brigandish 5y ago
This is the (in)famous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 though, as I wrote, I don't think it's particularly special, it's just the one that gained notoriety. I actually responded to one just this week, they're rife. The optimism bias is a problem even for programmers.
tpetry 5y ago
It‘s a reference to this historic comment when dropbox was first shown on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

sangnoir 5y ago

It's not a misapprehension: selling tools to tool-makers requires that you walk a very fine line. A lot of closed-source tools have pissed off developers enough to be replaced by usually-superior open-source versions, e.g. Git replacing BitKeeper because kernel developers were not happy with BK. Outside of very specialized tools, open source tools tend to attract more contributors and quickly overtake incumbents (see compilers). JetBrains is one of the few companies that bucks the trend, and one I gladly give money to regardless of my increasing VSCode usage. Had Dropbox been marketed at developers only, it would have been a spectacular failure in a world where inotify, rsync, cron and scp already existed.

pxc 5y ago
> JetBrains is one of the few companies that bucks the trend, and one I gladly give money to regardless of my increasing VSCode usage. Large parts of IntelliJ are open-source as well, and sometimes they do get used in other open-source editors. Afaict they're pretty good citizens in terms of F/OSS.