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All of these problems go away the moment that we stop accepting non-free software. If we as consumers start saying "no, even if your product is better I will n

All of these problems go away the moment that we stop accepting non-free software. If we as consumers start saying "no, even if your product is better I will not sacrifice my long-term freedoms for the short-term advantage and convenience of your product", companies would still innovate, but they would be playing in a more leveled field.

krapp 5y ago
How about free software creators start innovating first, instead of insisting people should simply be willing to put up with poor quality because "freedom?" This way of thinking is the reason Gimp will never be a viable competitor to Photoshop. Meanwhile, Blender is actually used by professionals because its quality makes it worth the effort.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Who said anything about "putting up with poor quality"? > This way of thinking is the reason Gimp will never be a viable competitor to Photoshop. Have you contributed to Gimp in any way? How do you expect a barely funded project to compete with a multi-billion dollar company?
  - krapp 5y ago
    > Who said anything about "putting up with poor quality"? you did... >> If we as consumers start saying "no, even if your product is better I will not sacrifice my long-term freedoms for the short-term advantage and convenience of your product (...)" >Have you contributed to Gimp in any way? No. I don't have the time or the specific domain knowledge, and as a tool I don't find it useful enough to use. Have you? I didn't see a name on the contributors' page[0] that resembles your username. >How do you expect a barely funded project to compete with a multi-billion dollar company? I don't know. I do know that isn't an argument that's going to convince anyone using Photoshop to switch over to Gimp. Maybe one of the millionaires that hang out here can do it. [0]https://www.gimp.org/about/authors.html https://www.gimp.org/about/authors.html
    - rglullis 5y ago
      No, I did not. Making a priority to have free software in my stack is not the same as accepting anything "just because it is free". > I do know that isn't an argument that's going to convince anyone using Photoshop to switch over to Gimp. Gimp vs Photoshop is a somewhat bad example to the topic at hand (closed systems taking over free software that implement open protocols), so if you don't mind maybe we can go back to those? In this case, I am a backer of Mastodon. I also contributed to Pleroma and to the developers of Conversations (XMPP client). Nothing much (~100€/year), but I feel a lot better by contributing to them that I would ever feel by paying for Slack or Discord. The point is, it doesn't take a millionaire to do that. If companies took 5-10% of their IT budget to contribute to free alternatives of the closed software they use, perhaps they would quickly lessen their dependency on the closed software and free their resources.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  FOSS was innovating a lot, and then it took a major hit when people decided code and features were evil and they didn't want to risk any extra attack surface, and then all the P2P types seemingly mostly moved to blockchain dev. Plus, I suppose most P2P was piracy driven and piracy is no longer an everyday conversation topic, or something a lot of people would even think of. That might also have something to do with why the privacy conversation moved away from things like neutrality and right to encrypt, to focusing almost entirely on extreme hate for telemetry.

krapp 5y ago

How about free software creators start innovating first, instead of insisting people should simply be willing to put up with poor quality because "freedom?" This way of thinking is the reason Gimp will never be a viable competitor to Photoshop. Meanwhile, Blender is actually used by professionals because its quality makes it worth the effort.

rglullis 5y ago
Who said anything about "putting up with poor quality"? > This way of thinking is the reason Gimp will never be a viable competitor to Photoshop. Have you contributed to Gimp in any way? How do you expect a barely funded project to compete with a multi-billion dollar company?
- krapp 5y ago
  > Who said anything about "putting up with poor quality"? you did... >> If we as consumers start saying "no, even if your product is better I will not sacrifice my long-term freedoms for the short-term advantage and convenience of your product (...)" >Have you contributed to Gimp in any way? No. I don't have the time or the specific domain knowledge, and as a tool I don't find it useful enough to use. Have you? I didn't see a name on the contributors' page[0] that resembles your username. >How do you expect a barely funded project to compete with a multi-billion dollar company? I don't know. I do know that isn't an argument that's going to convince anyone using Photoshop to switch over to Gimp. Maybe one of the millionaires that hang out here can do it. [0]https://www.gimp.org/about/authors.html https://www.gimp.org/about/authors.html
  - rglullis 5y ago
    No, I did not. Making a priority to have free software in my stack is not the same as accepting anything "just because it is free". > I do know that isn't an argument that's going to convince anyone using Photoshop to switch over to Gimp. Gimp vs Photoshop is a somewhat bad example to the topic at hand (closed systems taking over free software that implement open protocols), so if you don't mind maybe we can go back to those? In this case, I am a backer of Mastodon. I also contributed to Pleroma and to the developers of Conversations (XMPP client). Nothing much (~100€/year), but I feel a lot better by contributing to them that I would ever feel by paying for Slack or Discord. The point is, it doesn't take a millionaire to do that. If companies took 5-10% of their IT budget to contribute to free alternatives of the closed software they use, perhaps they would quickly lessen their dependency on the closed software and free their resources.
eternityforest 5y ago
FOSS was innovating a lot, and then it took a major hit when people decided code and features were evil and they didn't want to risk any extra attack surface, and then all the P2P types seemingly mostly moved to blockchain dev. Plus, I suppose most P2P was piracy driven and piracy is no longer an everyday conversation topic, or something a lot of people would even think of. That might also have something to do with why the privacy conversation moved away from things like neutrality and right to encrypt, to focusing almost entirely on extreme hate for telemetry.