The all-star team works to develop software that works perfectly and will supplant all open source competition. Once they become dominant they can switch focus to monetizing literally every aspect of its functions and through enshitification destroy everything that made it great. But hey, what are ya gonna do?

I always make fun of this with the coworker that I’m training.

“See, the PDF is malformed and crashes the program. But that’s normal, this program costs only €700 per year. When it happens, use this free program to open it, and there’s no problem”

Honestly many times it’s better. Shoutout VLC, KDE, Linux, qBittorrent, Librewolf, Handbrake, Tenacity, CHIRP, Flipper Zero, and too many more to mention by name.

That’s because the “all star team of designers and engineers” spent 80% of their time in meetings to keep management up to date with the progress of the project, listen to yet another wild ass idea from marketing and because they adopted a new and fashionable Software Development Processes without understanding the principles behind it so have a daily 1h standup.

An app developed by hobbyists who, if not passionate about it, at least care enough to spend their time developing and contributing to it, even if it’s free

vs.

An all-star team of designers and engineers who are bogged down in corporate bureaucracy and do the absolute minimum to maintain their positions, while saving energy to do things that they actually enjoy. Like, oftentimes, it is developing the aforementioned free apps.

slightly worse

Five years later

only slightly better

Five years after that

Incompatible with my walled garden OS of crap

If open source is so great, why did Truecrypt get shutdown?

-Sincerely, Your friendly neighborhood FBI agent.

Saying millions of dollars like that’s a lot of money to spend developing an app. Meta has literally hundreds of devs just working on WhatsApp. You’ll burn through around a million dollars in one year with about six devs when you factor in all the costs.

Is it? I pretty much only use open source stuff and all other proprietary alternatives I know are shitty

corporations can create good applications and tooling, they also create toxic dark pattern applications

open source devs can create air tight software or they can make some dingus word alternatives that just doesn’t work at all

I love open source but there are certainly some bad programs out there (for free though)

Wtf are you guys talking about, like desktop apps are the end all be all of computing. 98 percent of codebases contain open source. There’s like 5000 open source libraries in your iphone. For most things there just are no proprietary alternatives. It is the state of the art, ubiquitous in everything from medical equipment to satellites and TVs. The digital economy runs open source, with an estimated worth of 8.8 trillion dollars.

The profit motive is why they throw so much money at it. I like FOSS better too but these differences can’t easily be separated.

There is like no advertisement at all. I don’t know what to consume anymore, heck, who I am

It’s a double-edged sword. The ease-of-use benefits of centralization outweigh the independence of open-source for most people. Without leadership or centralization of open-source, there will always be too many distros to choose from. Obviously, centralization of open-source software is self-negating, and not a realistic idea.

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