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This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but you can always have access to it and not have to worry about losing your daily driver (talking to

This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but you can always have access to it and not have to worry about losing your daily driver (talking to you Figma). Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.

jbaczuk 4y ago
FOSS has risks too.
- type0 4y ago
  Yes, it can even cause you to drop out of college https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Yeah I feel sick every time people pride FOSS/OSS only from consumers' perspective. While there's just a few way to financially sustain projects.
    - Existenceblinks 4y ago
      Congratulation downvoters you've successfully used free software on the back of people for a long time and don't want changes.
  - jbaczuk 4y ago
    lol
- marcodiego 4y ago
  Specially the risk of becoming a much better alternative.
  - jbaczuk 4y ago
    until users get too dependent on it and the maintainers stop maintaining it... or the maintainer goes rogue... or there is a vulnerability/bug introduced by someone... and you can't easily switch to another platform
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  Yeah, risk for the proprietary competition.
bolt7469 4y ago
rough at the edges That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.
- dmantis 4y ago
  If you are a company and not an individual, nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs instead of paying some try-to-hook-you-up-with-subscriptions company. Moreover, lots of OSS contributors are from China, Russia, India, Ukraine, etc - so a company may spend even less paying them for particular commits than buying software from bay area company. It's more about management mindset rather than insolvable problem. upd: And everybody wins - more quality OSS code, help developers in poor countries, less money to shitty companies like Adobe.
  - lowercased 4y ago
    > nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs company or individual, that's true. but there's still big opportunity costs and time factors. Pay someone $1000 now to perhaps get some polish/bugfixes in a release 2 months from now... and do what in the meantime? Deal with 15% more time spent in sub-par-for-my-needs software? You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just because you paid that money, you may still not get things as you want (or when you want).
    - newsclues 4y ago
      Hire devs and use OSS as a base to create the tools you need!
      - moonchrome 4y ago
        Hire dairy farmers to get the milk for your coffee - absolute insight into how it's produced. Also they got to raise cows from calves so no milk in the office for a while. But once you get it you can be sure it's organic ! That's not even going into the dev market situation right now ... I mean seriously have you people ever been near a situation where these kind of decisions are made ?
bearmode 4y ago
>It might be rough at the edges Often it's not just "rough around the edges", but fully missing features that are necessary (or STRONGLY desired) for a regular professional's workflow
acomjean 4y ago
In biology almost nobody pays for software. A lot of it is really rough around the edges (I have to install and try to run some of it as part of my job). It’s kinda interesting, most development is by grants and such, they don’t offer much in the way of support funding. A lot of development is fooling around taking output from a and making it work for b.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
> Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk. As far as a business is concerned, Figma is still available. There is no business continuity risk. I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. There are many open source projects that are basically dead. They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do. A good example would be the Gorilla libraries in Go, it is still being maintained but the fact the maintainer has been looking for such a long time for someone else to take over because they don't have the time really means the library is just kinda existing. There is a popular User library for the Symfony framework in PHP, it literally says in the docs that people are expected to move off of it because they won't maintain it and lists a bunch of reasons why. How many teams using that library would even know that? One of the biggest complaints I've seen open soure maintainers complain about is people asking if their project is dead or not. As far as the maintainer is concerned it's maintained, when they have time. But it looks to the world that it is dead. Just because you can get the source code and use it at any time because the license allows it doesn't mean you're able to depend on it. In fact, since you're often paying no one for it and most often not even said thanks to anyone (myself included). You're entitled to nothing, no support, no note that they won't be maintaining it, etc. It annoys me when people think that FOSS means it's something you can depend on, when it literally comes with a license that makes sure you understand there is no warranty. That's how much you can depend on it. The person giving it to you says use at your own risk.
- infamia 4y ago
  > I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. I feel the opposite, open source gives people and companies options and the ability to soldier on if someone loses interest in a technology. This site is littered with notices from companies that they intend to discontinue some paid product or service suddenly with very little notice. If a group of people or companies really care about an open source technology, it's easy enough for them to ensure the continued maintenance of something they're getting for free. Also, if you care deeply about a technology, chances are others do as well and those projects will continue well past what a commercial vendor would maintain.

jbaczuk 4y ago

FOSS has risks too.

type0 4y ago
Yes, it can even cause you to drop out of college https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  Yeah I feel sick every time people pride FOSS/OSS only from consumers' perspective. While there's just a few way to financially sustain projects.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Congratulation downvoters you've successfully used free software on the back of people for a long time and don't want changes.
- jbaczuk 4y ago
  lol
marcodiego 4y ago
Specially the risk of becoming a much better alternative.
- jbaczuk 4y ago
  until users get too dependent on it and the maintainers stop maintaining it... or the maintainer goes rogue... or there is a vulnerability/bug introduced by someone... and you can't easily switch to another platform
NayamAmarshe 4y ago
Yeah, risk for the proprietary competition.

bolt7469 4y ago

rough at the edges That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.

dmantis 4y ago
If you are a company and not an individual, nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs instead of paying some try-to-hook-you-up-with-subscriptions company. Moreover, lots of OSS contributors are from China, Russia, India, Ukraine, etc - so a company may spend even less paying them for particular commits than buying software from bay area company. It's more about management mindset rather than insolvable problem. upd: And everybody wins - more quality OSS code, help developers in poor countries, less money to shitty companies like Adobe.
- lowercased 4y ago
  > nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs company or individual, that's true. but there's still big opportunity costs and time factors. Pay someone $1000 now to perhaps get some polish/bugfixes in a release 2 months from now... and do what in the meantime? Deal with 15% more time spent in sub-par-for-my-needs software? You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just because you paid that money, you may still not get things as you want (or when you want).
  - newsclues 4y ago
    Hire devs and use OSS as a base to create the tools you need!
    - moonchrome 4y ago
      Hire dairy farmers to get the milk for your coffee - absolute insight into how it's produced. Also they got to raise cows from calves so no milk in the office for a while. But once you get it you can be sure it's organic ! That's not even going into the dev market situation right now ... I mean seriously have you people ever been near a situation where these kind of decisions are made ?

bearmode 4y ago

>It might be rough at the edges Often it's not just "rough around the edges", but fully missing features that are necessary (or STRONGLY desired) for a regular professional's workflow

acomjean 4y ago

In biology almost nobody pays for software. A lot of it is really rough around the edges (I have to install and try to run some of it as part of my job). It’s kinda interesting, most development is by grants and such, they don’t offer much in the way of support funding. A lot of development is fooling around taking output from a and making it work for b.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

> Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk. As far as a business is concerned, Figma is still available. There is no business continuity risk. I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. There are many open source projects that are basically dead. They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do. A good example would be the Gorilla libraries in Go, it is still being maintained but the fact the maintainer has been looking for such a long time for someone else to take over because they don't have the time really means the library is just kinda existing. There is a popular User library for the Symfony framework in PHP, it literally says in the docs that people are expected to move off of it because they won't maintain it and lists a bunch of reasons why. How many teams using that library would even know that? One of the biggest complaints I've seen open soure maintainers complain about is people asking if their project is dead or not. As far as the maintainer is concerned it's maintained, when they have time. But it looks to the world that it is dead. Just because you can get the source code and use it at any time because the license allows it doesn't mean you're able to depend on it. In fact, since you're often paying no one for it and most often not even said thanks to anyone (myself included). You're entitled to nothing, no support, no note that they won't be maintaining it, etc. It annoys me when people think that FOSS means it's something you can depend on, when it literally comes with a license that makes sure you understand there is no warranty. That's how much you can depend on it. The person giving it to you says use at your own risk.

infamia 4y ago
> I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. I feel the opposite, open source gives people and companies options and the ability to soldier on if someone loses interest in a technology. This site is littered with notices from companies that they intend to discontinue some paid product or service suddenly with very little notice. If a group of people or companies really care about an open source technology, it's easy enough for them to ensure the continued maintenance of something they're getting for free. Also, if you care deeply about a technology, chances are others do as well and those projects will continue well past what a commercial vendor would maintain.