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Those two things are connected. People will spend $10 on a coffee drink at Starbucks without blinking. Suggest that they spend $10 on a piece of software and t

• bluGill 3y ago
  Some people. There are people who think Starbucks is too expensive. There are people who donate to open source.
  • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    I don't know anyone who doesn't think Starbucks is overpriced slop. In any European city you'll find local cafes with better quality and prices than what Starbucks sell. They seem to only be present in the big metro areas that attract a lot of tourists, travelers and immigrants who are familiar with the Starbucks brand and go for that out of habbit and know quality, similar to how McDonald's is so popular.
    • zrail 3y ago
      Weird flex but ok. In any area big enough to have a Starbucks in the US you'll find at least one local cafe that has better coffee. You'll also find at least one with much worse coffee that thinks they're better. As you say, people go to Starbucks and McDonalds for familiar known quality and you should be happy for it. That way the tourists and immigrants stay out of your local cafe. Edit: to be clear I'm not defending supranational billion dollar corporations here.
      • creshal 3y ago
        Tourists and immigrants giving their money to an US company that funnels all the money away from the local tax collectors and underpays their workers is still a net negative. All we're left with is their pollution, and no tax revenue to pay for its removal.
        • sugarpile 3y ago
          Sounds like an issue to take up with your government. Don’t complain that other people spend _their_ money in a way _you_ disagree with.
          • creshal 3y ago
            "You can't blame us for offering bribes, you can only blame the people who take them" is a weird idea of morality.
            • joshmanders 3y ago
              I mean you're the one who votes for your officials in your area, so if they're accepting bribes that is kind of on you isn't it? I as a tourist didn't elect your officials, so it's not on me.
    • creshal 3y ago
      Looks like you offended some Americans' sensibilities, but it's pretty much on point outside the US. We already have a coffee culture, we don't need union-busting megacorps giving us worse for higher prices and lower worker wages, thanks.
    • bluGill 3y ago
      You need to meet more people. I know many who think Starbucks is great coffee. I know others who hate it. That is diversity.
    • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      > In any European city you'll find... This is so ridiculously optimistic and misinformed. In Poland’s cities, for example, the cafes mainly belong to chains like Costa Coffee and Green Coffee Nero, which act identically to Starbucks in terms of prices, quality, and range of drinks. There aren’t many independent cafes left, let alone ones with lower prices than a Starbucks. Similarly, in Helsinki the choice largely comes down to chains like Espresso House and Robert’s Coffee that are no different than Starbucks.
      • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        That sounds strange and mildly concerning for Poland, as Romanian cities are full with small local cafes not part of any chains, but unlike Starbucks & Co. they're just cafes, as in you go there to get a coffee and drink it, not to loiter for hours on a macbook and use it as a coworking space. Kind of like how it's in Italy/Portugal/Austria.
        • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
          If you are posting from Romania, then you have a very warped perception of Europe’s cafes overall. But even in Romania, the old Central European and Balkan tradition of the cafe as a home away from home for intellectuals is dying. It has been well over a decade now since many of Cluj’s independent cafes began to play loud blooming music to discourage lingering, and staff were instructed to immediately pick up a customer’s empty glass and say “Va mai servesc cu ceva?", in order to nudge the customer to order more or get out. And of course, prices have risen to about the same as Starbucks.
          • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
            >many of Cluj’s independent cafes began to play loud blooming music to discourage lingering Maybe because Cluj is an overrated, overpriced Silicon Valley wannabe (sorry to be so blunt), so greedy old-town cafe owners jack up prices to match IT workers' and tourists' purchasing power. In Iasi for example, there's still small neighborhood cafes that sell affordable coffee, you just gotta avoid the old town and city center where all IT workers and tourists gather. >then you have a very warped perception of Europe overall Doubt it. Go to Italy, Portugal, Austria and many others, and it's full of small family owned cafes and traditional coffee houses serving just affordable coffee and cakes, not acting like a tourist trap or hipster co-working space.
• newsclues 3y ago
  People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on proprietary software. Most of those people won’t spend $100 on open source software.
  • api 3y ago
    Yep, and if you ask them to they will throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
    • hermannj314 3y ago
      Correct. They've learned the behavior that attacking someone's ego, sense of fairness, or duty pays off and costs little. Almost everyone in customer service or non-profit space has to deal with these leeches. Easy to defeat, fatal to ignore.
  • rpastuszak 3y ago
    I had this moment of cognitive dissonance when I noticed that one colleagues would use "open source" as a synonym for "poor quality". Context: I was working as a contractor, for a bank. That colleague was managing a bunch of *nix instances used to deploy our web services.
    • nablaone 3y ago
      Because open source projects are not products per se. If you use mostly a proprietary software, open source project can be perceived as "poor quality product".
  • pacifika 3y ago
    if they had to pay for open source then they couldn’t afford to pay for commercial software?
  • Frost1x 3y ago
    In businesses I've observed this behavior tends to surround dysfunctions in liability and understanding of liability organizationally and from business management. If you make a purchasing decision, your ass is on the line when people ask why certain product/service isn't fulfilling some arbitrary business need. In theory, assuming the functionality is part of the advertised purchase, the liability of the thing you're paying for lies on that third party. You did your due diligence. If you chose some open source combination with in-house build, they're going to question why you didn't outsource some envisioned cheaper third party option (sometimes, this is a legitimate strategy, often from my experience it's not). So you default to big vendor big solution to protect yourself. Apologies are made and blah blah, discussions about "what alternatives do/did we have" and you often end up landing on implementing some mixture of leveraging public domain software and in-house customization atop/leveraging it to solve the problem you were paying for. In the end, you end up doing what you probably knew was the correct path anyways: this vendor solution is questionable, it doesnt completely align with our business needs, and it's not going to get the actual need done. Conveying that to business leaders is often impossible though. So, to pass liability/responsibility and cover your ass with incompetent business leadership, you throw often thousands, tens, or hundreds of thousands away. I've had this discussion so many times and sat in these meetings so many times it grows tiring. The fact is, sometimes a generic solution works for your business (Office for example is a pretty generic need and often aligns), often it really doesn't (some arbitrary more niche/custom thing you do? Maybe, good luck).
• watwut 3y ago
  Overwhelming majority of people don't buy 10$ coffee. They just don't do it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ben0x539 3y ago
  Hm, why do you think that is? Do programmers just respect each other less than they respect baristas?
  • ThrowawayR2 3y ago
    Because they got trained to think that way by the "free as in speech and free as in beer" and "Why pay for Windoze? (sic) Linux is free" marketing the early FOSS advocates used.
  • ahepp 3y ago
    If Starbucks started giving the drinks away for free, I doubt people would still pay $10 for it.