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> Linux is held together by a scrappy group of volunteers competing against millions of dollars of investment and armies full of full-time employees. The best
by Beltalowda 5y ago
> Linux is held together by a scrappy group of volunteers competing against millions of dollars of investment and armies full of full-time employees.
The best example I know of this is GIMP; it has just a few (4 IIRC, could be 3 or 5 too, but thereabouts) people working on it in their spare time. That's it.
Folks complain that it's not as good as Photoshop, and that's true, but if you consider the team size it's actually pretty darn impressive! How many people work on Photoshop? I betcha it's a few more than a handful.
Not all of the Linux ecosystem is just volunteers though; most kernel contributions come from various companies; Ubuntu and RedHat work on a lot of different things (cue systemd discussion), etc.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThat's a great achievement for its developers but as a user it doesn't matter; if the tool doesn't do what I need I will use a different tool. Whether it has 2 developers or 2000 doesn't change that fact.
- Beltalowda 5y agoSure, but the point is that Linux-the-ecosystem is largely written by a bunch of people in their spare time, not infrequently for their own reasons (fun, "I want this", etc.), with fairly impressive results, and that expecting this to be on-par with a paid for-profit product with hundreds if not thousands of people working on it is kind of an unreasonable comparison. Seeing these things as "products" where "users" have to choose from in a "free market" is already a flawed outlook. That's not what people are doing or how they're thinking.