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I won't argue against the complaints you have with Mac, i have some of the same and many others do. I just think there genuinely IS a tension between open sour

I won't argue against the complaints you have with Mac, i have some of the same and many others do. I just think there genuinely IS a tension between open source/software freedom and great software. For an example, read about the recent case of Streamlabs. They stole the OBS code and rebranded it a little, copied the webpage down to the layout, but did not disclose any of that. They made tons of money and got acquired by Logitech. The people there successfully used the fact that OBS open sourced everything to steal their work and got rich off it. If Apple open sources their entire OS, why wouldn't the same thing happen? If that did happen, who pays for all the maintenance and new features on Mac? just recently I found a certain Mac OS app that sells pretty well. On decompiling it I found it was just an old open source command line utility, the dev literally threw in the binary and packaged it into an app. This was not disclosed anywhere of course. I've seen many, many examples of this across SaaS and other products - they take some free code, do nothing but repackage it and brand it, keep the profit and give nothing back to the creators. I would love if MacOS was open source and I could fix any OS/software when i hit a use case it doesn't solve well for me. If there was in theory a way to open source code without letting cheaters use it that would be great. But if piracy is easy then people default to it. No one paid for WinRAR back in the day and if we just let that model continue, 80% of the IT industry today wouldn't exist. Like i just see the entire ecosystem and industry with all the amazing technology we have now compared to the 90s was born partly because we found ways to charge for stuff and cut out freeloaders. No one on HN asks for a lower salary and we get these salaries _because_ these models prevent theft. So closed source is a compromise to a tough problem - im okay with that. I think the huge leaps sometimes take a LOT of money to build - say Apple designing and researching and paying to manufacture touchscreens for a decade before ever selling the first iPhone, or Amazon buying a billion servers to build the cloud, and I don't know if they would exist if they never got paid for the stuff they built.

smoldesu 5y ago
I'm not arguing for Apple to open-source their OS, I just want them to make something that's truly better than Linux/Windows for once. They have an unconscionable amount of money, and they do nearly nothing with it. My original argument was having more money doesn't neccesarily build better software, and MacOS is a prime example of that. A few notes though: > If that did happen, who pays for all the maintenance and new features on Mac? This is probably the last thing I'd worry about if MacOS was open source. As it stands today, Apple basically "maintains" the Mach kernel by strapping BSD patches onto the XNU kernel and praying nothing breaks, if the community maintained it we probably wouldn't need to wait months for new iterative versions to come out and fix relatively simple issues. > I've seen many, many examples of this across SaaS and other products - they take some free code, do nothing but repackage it and brand it, keep the profit and give nothing back to the creators. And that's fine. That free software is intended to support other people, and it's why there are distinctions between GPL and BSD licensing. When you write open-source software, imagining such a "worst case" scenario is the first things developers do, and they choose their license accordingly. In the Streamlabs example you brought up, the community rightfully called them out for being a ripoff of OBS, and encouraged people to go use the free version instead. Like I said earlier, "money is the problem, not the solution." > No one paid for WinRAR back in the day and if we just let that model continue, 80% of the awesome software today wouldn't exist. People didn't pay for WinRAR because 1. It didn't force you to. 2. There were several free alternatives, like 7ZIP. As you've mentioned earlier, the majority of "awesome software today" is really just free software strapped together with twine and bubblegum. 80% of SaaSes these days are simply frontends to software that could absolutely run locally. Even SaaSes don't see the end-user as an important asset, since the "new hotness" is moving on to B2B sales and bootstrapping directly onto another successful company like a parasite. Whether or not you consider this to be the utopian world of proprietary software is up to you, but I certainly appreciate things better in the FOSS world.

smoldesu 5y ago

I'm not arguing for Apple to open-source their OS, I just want them to make something that's truly better than Linux/Windows for once. They have an unconscionable amount of money, and they do nearly nothing with it. My original argument was having more money doesn't neccesarily build better software, and MacOS is a prime example of that. A few notes though: > If that did happen, who pays for all the maintenance and new features on Mac? This is probably the last thing I'd worry about if MacOS was open source. As it stands today, Apple basically "maintains" the Mach kernel by strapping BSD patches onto the XNU kernel and praying nothing breaks, if the community maintained it we probably wouldn't need to wait months for new iterative versions to come out and fix relatively simple issues. > I've seen many, many examples of this across SaaS and other products - they take some free code, do nothing but repackage it and brand it, keep the profit and give nothing back to the creators. And that's fine. That free software is intended to support other people, and it's why there are distinctions between GPL and BSD licensing. When you write open-source software, imagining such a "worst case" scenario is the first things developers do, and they choose their license accordingly. In the Streamlabs example you brought up, the community rightfully called them out for being a ripoff of OBS, and encouraged people to go use the free version instead. Like I said earlier, "money is the problem, not the solution." > No one paid for WinRAR back in the day and if we just let that model continue, 80% of the awesome software today wouldn't exist. People didn't pay for WinRAR because 1. It didn't force you to. 2. There were several free alternatives, like 7ZIP. As you've mentioned earlier, the majority of "awesome software today" is really just free software strapped together with twine and bubblegum. 80% of SaaSes these days are simply frontends to software that could absolutely run locally. Even SaaSes don't see the end-user as an important asset, since the "new hotness" is moving on to B2B sales and bootstrapping directly onto another successful company like a parasite. Whether or not you consider this to be the utopian world of proprietary software is up to you, but I certainly appreciate things better in the FOSS world.