4 ms·

> If you want to offer regular users the choice of libre software in near-parity with commercial offerings, you need a lot of money, a lot of developers, and bi

> If you want to offer regular users the choice of libre software in near-parity with commercial offerings, you need a lot of money, a lot of developers, and big organizations. As far as I can see, that's just an objective truth. How is this an objective truth? Also why is it that what was possible yesterday is not possible today? The GNU project was started in the early 80s when even in the western world only a very small minority had access to a computer. Since then we put computers in the hand of almost everyone but now we can't write serious free software without a big corporation/government & money? This is what happened in the early 00s, corporations like IBM understood they wouldn't be able to compete with free software now that we have the internet & everyone will have access to computers. So they captured the open source projects & even Microsoft understood 15 years later that they had to do it too. And now they have been successful in convincing you that no serious software can written without them and you consider that an "objective truth". And on top of that the EU & others are telling you can't have serious & safe software without complying to their regulations... Just look at the BSDs, they have been able to keep up with Linux (I mean they are in the same ballpark in term of security, features & performance) with a fraction of the money.

ForHackernews 3y ago
IMHO it's not possible today because of higher expectations from nontechnical users and radical complexity bloat in commercial software. There is a path-dependence in software and it's almost inconceivable that a small team of hobbyists starting from scratch could build, for example, an office suite that could compete with MS Office or Google Docs. For better or worse, we're stuck with Libre Office. Even Microsoft, with their massive resources, decided they weren't up to building and maintaining their own browser engine. They've chained themselves to Google's Blink along with everyone else. BSD is an interesting example: less hardware support, fewer GUI options, good luck running BSD on a mobile phone. Can you imagine your parents trying to use BSD as their primary OS?

ForHackernews 3y ago

IMHO it's not possible today because of higher expectations from nontechnical users and radical complexity bloat in commercial software. There is a path-dependence in software and it's almost inconceivable that a small team of hobbyists starting from scratch could build, for example, an office suite that could compete with MS Office or Google Docs. For better or worse, we're stuck with Libre Office. Even Microsoft, with their massive resources, decided they weren't up to building and maintaining their own browser engine. They've chained themselves to Google's Blink along with everyone else. BSD is an interesting example: less hardware support, fewer GUI options, good luck running BSD on a mobile phone. Can you imagine your parents trying to use BSD as their primary OS?