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Anyone who has ever actually worked on OSS or just hangs out in ANY support channel/forum for open source will see that users are endlessly demanding, need lots

Anyone who has ever actually worked on OSS or just hangs out in ANY support channel/forum for open source will see that users are endlessly demanding, need lots of support, but will never, ever pay for anything if a free alternative exists. Linus and the “gamers” will compare and try distros, point out tiny flaws, judge developer team strength but the one thing they will almost never, ever do is _pay money_. Even the nicest folks try their best, ask for support politely but they typically will not or cannot pay, and cannot contribute to a project beyond a solid bug report in most cases. Linux OSS fanboys also are allergic to paying for software. God forbid someone charges a dollar for a useful application on a linux distro. Elementary OS is trying to inch towards payment with a “pay what you want” model because developers and teams actually charging for their labor would piss off 99% of the users. They may talk about the virtues of open source but what 95% of (non-technical) users love about open source is the fact that its FREE. Kovid Goyal, creator of Calibre & Kitty gets ~$3000/month on Patreon for software used by millions that he’s built and supported for a decade now. How much does Amazon make on the Kindle instead? Tens or hundreds of millions? This isn’t a case of an evil corporate company not paying for OSS either, its just people who like to read. We could end the Chrome hegemony tomorrow if Firefox was realistically able to charge for a browser, hire folks and not get completely dropped by their userbase. I hang out in the Firefox chats and fixed a bug once. Like most OSS, “community driven” basically means ~1000 people are actually willing and able to contribute to the project in some capacity. The rest is freeloaders, even if they happen to have good intentions. Google figured out an indirect way to get compensated for what they build because they too know users will not pay for a browser, or a search engine, or maps, or cloud storage, or photos, or news or everything else Google just gives us for free. As developers we could help solve this problem too - simply work for Mozilla negotiate a lower salary if you feel so strongly.

smoldesu 5y ago
Adding money to the equation doesn't fix problems. It's another situation of "the mythical man-month" where you can hire as many people as you want, but it doesn't make the problem go away faster. Take MacOS for example: it's an operating system that has thousands of people working on it, backed with decades of R&D as well as hundreds of billions of dollars. That doesn't make it any easier for Apple to support 32-bit software, add Vulkan drivers to their system or make a decent first-party software distribution system that doesn't scalp the developers selling their software. Every organization has their own goals and ulterior motives, if Firefox got 100 million dollars tomorrow they'd probably use it to add a second "Pocket" advertisement on your taskbar and lock the rest away in a vault somewhere. Open source software walks a hard line on freedom. Nothing is stopping you from charging a dollar for your Linux software, but nobody will pay for it unless you're offering some kind of actual utility. Similarly, if Google started charging a dollar for their browser, I imagine there would be a lot of disgruntled people looking for new browsers. Money is not the solution here, it's the problem. Hiding away code and restricting access is the opposite of freedom, and while you're welcome to disagree with the principle it doesn't change the fact that there's thousands of open source projects floating around, many of them best-in-class. Do you think Hacker News would exist if every CSS component charged a dollar so you could support the developers, or every coreutil you used had a 50-cent tax after every invocation?
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  Linux desktop is great now because OSes have stagnated and its easier to catch up. Mac was as good in 2010, 10 years ago. I do believe that its at least partly because Apple had the money to hire and support teams full of talented people working hard. I see the same pattern in Firefox. Back when Chrome launched, and for years after, it was miles ahead of firefox and IE. Anyways, if money is a problem then just work for free lol. Easy solve. Why do you care about Vulkan on Apple anyways? Seems like you were a Mac user.. if i had to guess you used Mac for many years and switched recently, now that Linux desktop has become viable. Why did you not use linux 10 years ago too? The money you paid to Apple only causes problems right? If money is the root of evil you should work for free contributing to the FOSS you believe in and find some other way to pay the rent. But I guess money is the root of evil only when you're paying, not when you're getting paid.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    > Linux desktop is great now because OSes have stagnated and its easier to catch up. The Linux desktop was fine, arguably since GTK2 was popularized. The software selection was a little sparse, but I genuinely liked it more than the Aqua UI at the time. (as well as... whatever Windows 7 was doing. Aero?) > Mac was as good in 2010, 10 years ago. I do believe that its at least partly because Apple had the money to hire and support excellent teams full of brilliant people. Maybe so, but I seldom really saw it pay off. Things definitely looked prettier on MacOS, but I was often frustrated by things that should "just work" like Time Machine and Safari, so I really spent the majority of my time on MacOS looking for alternatives to Apple's own software. Whatever lead they had in 2010 has been greatly diminished though, especially since Big Sur's release. I just can't even fathom using their new UI... > Anyways, if money is a problem then just work for free lol. I suppose I do, if you count open source contributions. >Why do you care about Vulkan on Apple anyways? It's nice. DXVK is very powerful, and not being able to use it on my Macbook kinda makes it a no-go for regular use. You can argue that it "doesn't matter" and try to trivialize my desires as much as you want, but it's Apple's move. My Windows machines had it, my Linux devices have it, Apple is the only one left who doesn't. > Seems like you were a Mac user.. if i had to guess you used Mac for many years and switched recently, now that Linux desktop has become viable. I used to use Windows for gaming and my Mac for programming, but once Proton got good enough I figured it was time to retire them both. Windows and MacOS were starting to get too slow to daily-drive, and my Mac wouldn't even run Mojave without idling above 50c. Plus, Apple's software quality has taken a complete nosedive in recent years. Sierra was the first step in a pretty questionable direction, and everything running Catalina and beyond is completely foreign to me. Plus, the little things like package management and process handling started to get increasingly difficult, to the point that it was actively making it harder for me to do my job. Safari's endless popup notifications drove me up the wall while I was happily using Chrome, and having to blow hundreds of gigs just to use little utilities like Xcode finally pushed me over the edge. I couldn't buy a machine with upgradable memory or even accessible storage. Modern Macs are about as repairable as a cellphone, which I find abhorrent. > Why did you not use linux 10 years ago too? I did, I've had an x201 for about a decade that's happily served as a media server and a Nextcloud/Syncthing host for quite a while now. On desktop, it was mostly down to a lack of software: there was a period where you couldn't run everything you wanted unless you had both Windows and Mac, but nowadays the holdouts have mostly given up. I've got Slack, VS Code, Discord, Steam, Spotify, and pretty much anything from Windows that I really cared about like Ableton Live. Plus, I can plug in any GPU that I want and expect it to work fairly well on Linux, which is definitely not the case for MacOS. Really not ideal for the times that I'm playing with AI or CUDA acceleration. Running Linux virtualized was a pretty good solution for a while, but with QEMU I can run Windows and MacOS with baremetal performance. This isn't intended to dunk on MacOS, as much as it might seem like it (and as much as people insist that I do). I still think Mojave is one of the best OSes you can use these days, especially if you're not an enthusiast. My demands outgrew MacOS though, and Apple's demands offended me. Switching to Linux made perfect sense for my workflow, and it went smoother than I expected on the desktop. My overall point is that money is nice, but it won't buy you software freedom. You could have all the money in the world, and Apple wouldn't let you audit their source code or plug in an Nvidia graphics card. Instead of fighting them at every corner, I've given up, and I'm happier than I've ever been.

smoldesu 5y ago

Adding money to the equation doesn't fix problems. It's another situation of "the mythical man-month" where you can hire as many people as you want, but it doesn't make the problem go away faster. Take MacOS for example: it's an operating system that has thousands of people working on it, backed with decades of R&D as well as hundreds of billions of dollars. That doesn't make it any easier for Apple to support 32-bit software, add Vulkan drivers to their system or make a decent first-party software distribution system that doesn't scalp the developers selling their software. Every organization has their own goals and ulterior motives, if Firefox got 100 million dollars tomorrow they'd probably use it to add a second "Pocket" advertisement on your taskbar and lock the rest away in a vault somewhere. Open source software walks a hard line on freedom. Nothing is stopping you from charging a dollar for your Linux software, but nobody will pay for it unless you're offering some kind of actual utility. Similarly, if Google started charging a dollar for their browser, I imagine there would be a lot of disgruntled people looking for new browsers. Money is not the solution here, it's the problem. Hiding away code and restricting access is the opposite of freedom, and while you're welcome to disagree with the principle it doesn't change the fact that there's thousands of open source projects floating around, many of them best-in-class. Do you think Hacker News would exist if every CSS component charged a dollar so you could support the developers, or every coreutil you used had a 50-cent tax after every invocation?

zaptheimpaler 5y ago
Linux desktop is great now because OSes have stagnated and its easier to catch up. Mac was as good in 2010, 10 years ago. I do believe that its at least partly because Apple had the money to hire and support teams full of talented people working hard. I see the same pattern in Firefox. Back when Chrome launched, and for years after, it was miles ahead of firefox and IE. Anyways, if money is a problem then just work for free lol. Easy solve. Why do you care about Vulkan on Apple anyways? Seems like you were a Mac user.. if i had to guess you used Mac for many years and switched recently, now that Linux desktop has become viable. Why did you not use linux 10 years ago too? The money you paid to Apple only causes problems right? If money is the root of evil you should work for free contributing to the FOSS you believe in and find some other way to pay the rent. But I guess money is the root of evil only when you're paying, not when you're getting paid.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > Linux desktop is great now because OSes have stagnated and its easier to catch up. The Linux desktop was fine, arguably since GTK2 was popularized. The software selection was a little sparse, but I genuinely liked it more than the Aqua UI at the time. (as well as... whatever Windows 7 was doing. Aero?) > Mac was as good in 2010, 10 years ago. I do believe that its at least partly because Apple had the money to hire and support excellent teams full of brilliant people. Maybe so, but I seldom really saw it pay off. Things definitely looked prettier on MacOS, but I was often frustrated by things that should "just work" like Time Machine and Safari, so I really spent the majority of my time on MacOS looking for alternatives to Apple's own software. Whatever lead they had in 2010 has been greatly diminished though, especially since Big Sur's release. I just can't even fathom using their new UI... > Anyways, if money is a problem then just work for free lol. I suppose I do, if you count open source contributions. >Why do you care about Vulkan on Apple anyways? It's nice. DXVK is very powerful, and not being able to use it on my Macbook kinda makes it a no-go for regular use. You can argue that it "doesn't matter" and try to trivialize my desires as much as you want, but it's Apple's move. My Windows machines had it, my Linux devices have it, Apple is the only one left who doesn't. > Seems like you were a Mac user.. if i had to guess you used Mac for many years and switched recently, now that Linux desktop has become viable. I used to use Windows for gaming and my Mac for programming, but once Proton got good enough I figured it was time to retire them both. Windows and MacOS were starting to get too slow to daily-drive, and my Mac wouldn't even run Mojave without idling above 50c. Plus, Apple's software quality has taken a complete nosedive in recent years. Sierra was the first step in a pretty questionable direction, and everything running Catalina and beyond is completely foreign to me. Plus, the little things like package management and process handling started to get increasingly difficult, to the point that it was actively making it harder for me to do my job. Safari's endless popup notifications drove me up the wall while I was happily using Chrome, and having to blow hundreds of gigs just to use little utilities like Xcode finally pushed me over the edge. I couldn't buy a machine with upgradable memory or even accessible storage. Modern Macs are about as repairable as a cellphone, which I find abhorrent. > Why did you not use linux 10 years ago too? I did, I've had an x201 for about a decade that's happily served as a media server and a Nextcloud/Syncthing host for quite a while now. On desktop, it was mostly down to a lack of software: there was a period where you couldn't run everything you wanted unless you had both Windows and Mac, but nowadays the holdouts have mostly given up. I've got Slack, VS Code, Discord, Steam, Spotify, and pretty much anything from Windows that I really cared about like Ableton Live. Plus, I can plug in any GPU that I want and expect it to work fairly well on Linux, which is definitely not the case for MacOS. Really not ideal for the times that I'm playing with AI or CUDA acceleration. Running Linux virtualized was a pretty good solution for a while, but with QEMU I can run Windows and MacOS with baremetal performance. This isn't intended to dunk on MacOS, as much as it might seem like it (and as much as people insist that I do). I still think Mojave is one of the best OSes you can use these days, especially if you're not an enthusiast. My demands outgrew MacOS though, and Apple's demands offended me. Switching to Linux made perfect sense for my workflow, and it went smoother than I expected on the desktop. My overall point is that money is nice, but it won't buy you software freedom. You could have all the money in the world, and Apple wouldn't let you audit their source code or plug in an Nvidia graphics card. Instead of fighting them at every corner, I've given up, and I'm happier than I've ever been.