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This attitude is harmful. There are legitimate (or maybe illegitimate in your view, but real) reasons people have to stick with proprietary software. As long as

This attitude is harmful. There are legitimate (or maybe illegitimate in your view, but real) reasons people have to stick with proprietary software. As long as these aren't solved, people can't switch. While free software may not have a marketing budget, its freedom aspect is generally an inherent advantage over other software (no licensing, no user hostility). There may be proprietary alternatives to Aufacity and Gimp, but nobody knows them because the FOSS versions are so easy to get. If there are two largely equivalent pieces of software, one proprietary and the other FOSS, the FOSS one will win. It just has to be good enough. But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be. FreeCAD is getting better and getting quite decent for hobby stuff (I still find Fusion much more intuitive, but it's getting alright), but we can't just go "why doesn't everybody switch, they must be dumb", just because we are happy with the functionality. This isn't specifically directed at you, but a specific FOSS-high-horse attitude I see every now and then and used to hold myself. I think it's something that keeps FOSS from gaining market share by solving real problems people have. I could tell you a bunch of stories of people trying really hard to switch and ending up in a world of pain. We can't hand-wave that away. We have to actually improve the things we want people to use.

j-bos 3y ago
I agree, on your point of resolving limitations which prevent switching, is there a standard, or hub for listing limitations, bugs, inconveniences according to how much friction they provide potential adopters?
Silhouette 3y ago
But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be. This is the key point that is forever being overlooked by FOSS evangelists. Take a look at the most well known FOSS alternatives for everyday software that a lot of people use like a word processor, spreadsheet or graphics package. We have applications like the LibreOffice suite, the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. For personal or hobbyist use they're very worthy efforts and it's great that we have these things freely available. But for professional use when quality is essential and time is money they aren't even close. For years these totemic FOSS products have mostly emulated the style of established proprietary applications but usually without the resources that the developers of those proprietary applications can employ because they're running commercially and charging real money for their products. That inevitably means the FOSS applications tend to have more limited functionality and less work gets done on vital areas like usability and documentation. Meanwhile if you look at the last few years in the rest of the software industry those kinds of applications have been getting pushed aside anyway. Browsers and online software that fundamentally changes the way we use software have taken over many areas. Products like Figma or Google Docs that have targeted specific markets well and taken advantage of the new platform have enjoyed enormous success even though they didn't necessarily compete 1:1 on features or offer fully compatible import/export with the established native software applications they might appear to compete with. And in the world of native applications we have the likes of the Affinity suite that was offering more credible competition for Adobe within a few years of the Creative Cloud subscription model being introduced than the much longer-established FOSS products ever have. That's partly because it also costs real money that can fund a full-time professional team to build the product. It's also partly because that team seems to have taken a fresh look at UI ideas - not an area where Adobe's graphics products have enjoyed a great reputation in the past - and managed to come up with something familiar yet also without a lot of the warts. That's what a successful FOSS competitor needs to do as well IMHO but it can only happen if the people leading the effort have a vision of something that changes the game and enough contributors are willing to help them turn that vision into reality. So far that has been the exception not the rule within the FOSS community. There will always be those who are fans and advocates of FOSS for other reasons and that's totally fine but it's also not enough to shift the professional communities that fund most software development to using and supporting the further development of FOSS instead.

j-bos 3y ago

I agree, on your point of resolving limitations which prevent switching, is there a standard, or hub for listing limitations, bugs, inconveniences according to how much friction they provide potential adopters?

Silhouette 3y ago

But it has to be good enough. We shouldn't delude ourselves that Gimp is in the same playing field as Photoshop, for instance; as much as I'd like it to be. This is the key point that is forever being overlooked by FOSS evangelists. Take a look at the most well known FOSS alternatives for everyday software that a lot of people use like a word processor, spreadsheet or graphics package. We have applications like the LibreOffice suite, the GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. For personal or hobbyist use they're very worthy efforts and it's great that we have these things freely available. But for professional use when quality is essential and time is money they aren't even close. For years these totemic FOSS products have mostly emulated the style of established proprietary applications but usually without the resources that the developers of those proprietary applications can employ because they're running commercially and charging real money for their products. That inevitably means the FOSS applications tend to have more limited functionality and less work gets done on vital areas like usability and documentation. Meanwhile if you look at the last few years in the rest of the software industry those kinds of applications have been getting pushed aside anyway. Browsers and online software that fundamentally changes the way we use software have taken over many areas. Products like Figma or Google Docs that have targeted specific markets well and taken advantage of the new platform have enjoyed enormous success even though they didn't necessarily compete 1:1 on features or offer fully compatible import/export with the established native software applications they might appear to compete with. And in the world of native applications we have the likes of the Affinity suite that was offering more credible competition for Adobe within a few years of the Creative Cloud subscription model being introduced than the much longer-established FOSS products ever have. That's partly because it also costs real money that can fund a full-time professional team to build the product. It's also partly because that team seems to have taken a fresh look at UI ideas - not an area where Adobe's graphics products have enjoyed a great reputation in the past - and managed to come up with something familiar yet also without a lot of the warts. That's what a successful FOSS competitor needs to do as well IMHO but it can only happen if the people leading the effort have a vision of something that changes the game and enough contributors are willing to help them turn that vision into reality. So far that has been the exception not the rule within the FOSS community. There will always be those who are fans and advocates of FOSS for other reasons and that's totally fine but it's also not enough to shift the professional communities that fund most software development to using and supporting the further development of FOSS instead.