[ohiovr]

Linux Mint is my main desktop operating system now after abandoning Windows and MacOS. I tried Debian, Ubuntu, Open Suse, but settled on Mint because I was familiar with Ubuntu and Mint feels traditional and polished.

Every day I see sad examples of eternal September's march to the written abyss.

I had a dream of writing a significant open source project but the reality of entitled user disruption, lack of clear economic benefit, lack of even personal benefit makes me think its a terrible idea. I wrote a closed source software that sells on the Apple app store. Despite nearly a million Downloads, and thousands of reviews and some real money too, the level of serious entitled bitchyness found everywhere in the open source world is non existant with my product. I even sell it for $19.99 well above typical app store prices.

I love open source, I wish I could contribute but as of now there are more downs than ups.

[MrTonyD]

I ran my own company for a few years just to make money to stop working so I could contribute to open source. By the time I finally made enough to not have to worry about money anymore, I had spent enough years working with open source to realize that big companies get great benefits (I was in meetings with HP, IBM, and Oracle VPs where open source was being supported to transfer responsibility and costs away from those companies.) At the same time, it is Software Developers and associated staffs which lose income. There is also less profit to invest in high quality documentation, training, support, and research (ever notice how most open source companies didn't actually develop the technology - they are just monetizing it through support or consulting?)

So I had the chance to live my dream - supporting our community through open source - but realized that it was ultimately the wrong dream for our society.

[ohiovr]

Thank you for the story!