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Perhaps open source would be better if we had less people like this willing to fund proprietary development while writing hate pieces towards open source.

seanhunter 3y ago
Open source is amazing. It's more than good enough to stand people writing snarky hot takes to increase their blog viewership. It just turns out that the economics of open source aren't necessarily a good fit for every use case. It's just not going to win everywhere for every user. I'll give you an example: computer algebra and graphing. Open source we have maxima (and wxmaxima). It is.... well weird but highly functional. It crashes from time to time but when it's not crashing you can do a lot with it. Every plot has thousands of options and you sort of need to specify most of them to get anything that looks half-decent. For some reason I don't fully understand you have to specify gnuplot options as well as maxima options sometimes but it's nice that it supports both of them. It's an absolute labour of love by the team who develop it. Paid for there is Mathematica. If you're a student it's like 75 bucks a year but if you're trying to use it in industry it's nearly 4 grand. Per user per year. It can do basically the same sort of thing as maxima but the graphs look amazing out of the box, the options aren't weird, there is support etc etc. Now here's the thing: Maxima is much better than Mathematica at certain things. And it's free. But it's really weird and some simple things are hard (like just graphing 2 2-d plots on the same axis) until you get the hang of it. And it's sort of lispy which I like but is weird for many people.
- lacrosse_tannin 3y ago
  the author contributes to all kinds of opensource
danenania 3y ago
Open source is great, but why should anyone expect engineers to create serious alternatives to products with millions in revenue for them for free? I'm probably kicking the hornets' nest here, but I see this as a naive perspective that mainly benefits big tech and VC-funded projects that can afford to fund free stuff as loss leaders or funnels into their proprietary offerings. You should want to pay for the important tools you use. That's how you know that that they're sustainable, that fixes and improvements will be prioritized, and that there's no ulterior motive for the owner of the project. It also creates a healthy ecosystem where indie devs and startups can get traction and make money when they build useful stuff. A race to the bottom only benefits the established players.

seanhunter 3y ago

Open source is amazing. It's more than good enough to stand people writing snarky hot takes to increase their blog viewership. It just turns out that the economics of open source aren't necessarily a good fit for every use case. It's just not going to win everywhere for every user. I'll give you an example: computer algebra and graphing. Open source we have maxima (and wxmaxima). It is.... well weird but highly functional. It crashes from time to time but when it's not crashing you can do a lot with it. Every plot has thousands of options and you sort of need to specify most of them to get anything that looks half-decent. For some reason I don't fully understand you have to specify gnuplot options as well as maxima options sometimes but it's nice that it supports both of them. It's an absolute labour of love by the team who develop it. Paid for there is Mathematica. If you're a student it's like 75 bucks a year but if you're trying to use it in industry it's nearly 4 grand. Per user per year. It can do basically the same sort of thing as maxima but the graphs look amazing out of the box, the options aren't weird, there is support etc etc. Now here's the thing: Maxima is much better than Mathematica at certain things. And it's free. But it's really weird and some simple things are hard (like just graphing 2 2-d plots on the same axis) until you get the hang of it. And it's sort of lispy which I like but is weird for many people.

lacrosse_tannin 3y ago
the author contributes to all kinds of opensource

danenania 3y ago

Open source is great, but why should anyone expect engineers to create serious alternatives to products with millions in revenue for them for free? I'm probably kicking the hornets' nest here, but I see this as a naive perspective that mainly benefits big tech and VC-funded projects that can afford to fund free stuff as loss leaders or funnels into their proprietary offerings. You should want to pay for the important tools you use. That's how you know that that they're sustainable, that fixes and improvements will be prioritized, and that there's no ulterior motive for the owner of the project. It also creates a healthy ecosystem where indie devs and startups can get traction and make money when they build useful stuff. A race to the bottom only benefits the established players.