Because it can’t be turned into a service
I’ve actually found a lot of the smaller foss tools I use are better than their proprietary counterparts because of the design philosophy and that people don’t cut as many corners on passion projects as when they’re on a deadline
For real. I just spent a decade in academia working dog hours with little pay keeping services running wondering how the true devs and sysadmins do it.
I recently switched to the corporate world and have peeked behind curtain of competency: headless chickens running around, patching failing products rather than spending time to properly fix them because immediate results are the only metric that counts.
Stability, scalability, reproducibility? Forget it, that’s someone else’s problem apparently.
Late stage capitalism.
The issue is that capitalism fundamentally requires forward thinkers and enlightened (or at least rational) perspective to function sustainably.
But capitalism rewards short term thinking, everywhere from corporate leadership, to the workforce, to the consumers caught by ads designed to catch and hold their ever-shortening attention spans.
Fundamentally, it needs regulation to thrive. The true cost of a purchase, including environmental and decommissioning/disposal costs must be tied to the initial purchase value. Through this, we might get a functional capitalism.
"Dear floss4life,
Our developers have encountered an issue while using the open source framework you published on github. We have lost as many as 400 user accounts. The estimated cost of this error is $6800.
This is unacceptable. Be a professional and fix it immediately.
Chad Elkowitz, MBA, Gruvbert and sons Finance Lt"
It’s funny because apps like Blender and Krita are actually competitive to proprietary software.
And Firefox, git, Dia, gimp, etc…
Proprietary OS’s like Windows and macOS lack package managers too that tools like chocolatey and homebrew provide.
And OBS
Windows has WinGet now, which is a built in package manager. It might not be as good as most linux distro package managers, but it does exist.
Dia and gimp are ok, but they’re still quite behind the curve. I love floss and wouldn’t use the closed alternatives, but we got to know where we stand.
There are proprietary VCS?
There were many.
git was created because a proprietary VCS was being a dick
There’s perforce
And Linux/BSD are so good proprietary developers rip them off to whatever degree legally permissible.
Microsoft servers also use linux
Blender had a reeeeaaally long way though, I remember a time where Blender was quite big already but Maya just was miles ahead in terms of usability. Nowadays they are not only even, Blender is probably used more often since it’s not only free but more people know how to use it than Maya
I love this meme because every app on my phone designed by a company worth more than a million dollars fucking sucks, and the best app on my phone is RIF, an app designed by a single developer, and reanimated into a lich by a team of programmers for free
Wait RIF was reanimated? In what way?
Wait wait wait… RiF ain’t dead?!
I would say it’s undead. Like a Lich. The fine folks at revanced.app have done an amazing job reanimating it. It’s just as good as it was last June!
i want to boil people like this alive
in minecraft of course
Minetest*
Luanti*
It got renamed? That seems pretty crazy, but it might be for the better considering the original name didn’t really suggest it was a serious independent project.
Read “The Mythical Man-Month”.
Basically, a team of 5-8 motivated developers can create high quality, medium complexity software extremely fast.
But if the project is just a little too complex for one team of devs and you need more people, then you’ll need a lot more people. And a lot more time.Cause the more people you add to the project, the more overhead you have. Suddenly you need to pull devs off coding to bring new hires up to speed. You need to write documentation on coding style guidelines, hold meetings, maintain your infrastructure, negotiate with hardware suppliers, have someone fix the server room’s door locks, schedule job interviews, etc. etc.
Counterpoint: ‘The Brooks’s Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.’
Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s05.html
It absolutely fucking BAFFLES me that Brooks’ Law isn’t known by every software manager on the planet.
I’ve quoted it so many times at work, even in engineering focused teams in at least two big tech companies. It’s not a concrete fact, but it explains why so many teams are hilariously shit at delivering software.
“What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”
