[kibwen]

> "It's not as good as this other (proprietary) software, but it's free" won't cut it.

Except that it has to cut it in order for a free software movement to exist, because otherwise free software is starved by a chicken-and-egg problem where developers don't use free software because it's inferior, and free software never improves because developers don't use it. In other words, being willing to use technically inferior software solely because of the superior freedoms it grants is the way to make the engine of free software run. GCC was not the best C compiler in the world when Linux started using it.

[groby_b]

That argument is not holding any water.

First, free software doesn't improve "because developers use it". It improves because developers work on it. Blaming the users for that problem is not helping at all, except with a vague sense of moral superiority.

Second, people use tools (e.g. software) to achieve things. "Making the engine of free software run" is not on that list of things for the vast majority of people, so maybe we should try giving them reasons that actually matter to them.

Third, the reason that GCC was used for Linux was that it was the only one that was widely available, free, and had a 386 backend that produced useful code. Nobody involved gave a bit about "engines of free software" and "superior freedom", it was the only tool to get the job done.

It was certainly not technically inferior at the time.

Fourth, a large part of the reason for commercial software usage is the incredibly sanctimonious community around OSS.

If I can buy a piece of software that does exactly what I need, in a pleasant way, for a small amount of money, potentially even with support that cares about me? Why ON EARTH would I sink tons of time into a craptastic piece of software with horrible UI and an abusive community?

Like it or not, OSS is competing in a marketplace. It doesn't need to win on all axes, but it needs to win on some outside of "free"

[kibwen]

The distinction between "developers use this" and "developers work on this" is irrelevant in this context, because to a first approximation no developer volunteers their time to software they do not themselves use or hope to use. If nobody wants to use your software, there is nobody who will take time out to contribute to it.

Secondly, nobody is suggesting that free software should not try to compete on non-philosophical terms. What people are suggesting is that a volunteer project cannot perpetually out-compete a well-funded proprietary competitor. If people care about the continued existence of free software, then they will at times have to console themselves with using software that, while hopefully fit for purpose, is quite possibly not best-in-class.

[ahartmetz]

If you take care of your own interests in a more thoughtful way than "I want what works best and I want it now", Free Software looks much better. Short-term pragmatism can shoot you in the foot long-term. Lock-in and control are very real things.

[groby_b]

And long-term zealotry can shoot you in the foot long-term, too.

There are trade-offs. OSS can shift trade-offs on some of the axes, but that's about a cultural change.

It means giving up on the ludicrous idea that GitHub is bad because it "runs proprietary JavaScript executed in our browsers". It means realizing that "writing code" is a tiny part of creating a useful product. It means giving up on the disdain for all things non-engineering. It means welcoming people into the community who "just" want to write documentation, or work on UX, or any number of other things. It means letting go of overblown rhetoric like "we're the resistance now".

Above all, it's about realizing that it's not about "choosing a fight", but creating a better community.

[ahartmetz]

You are really making a lot of negative assumptions here. I happen to work (a little, I used to do more) on a F/OSS project that is all about user interface, and when I have no good idea for a UI, I ask an expert. Disdain for UX?? Please. Maybe you're thinking of that guy, I forget his name, that came up with git. He's very pragmatic about licensing, you'd like him.

(I actually think Linus is a positive figure overall, I just really can't stand git's UI)

[jakelazaroff]

I don't understand, though — there are so many cases in which free software dominates because it's better, despite proprietary alternatives from companies with deep pockets.

Most servers run Linux and Apache or nginx. The most popular CMS is WordPress. MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, and MongoDB are the most popular databases.

On macOS, the most common shell is bash, and most of the commands are free. According to the 2019 Stack Overflow developer survey, two of the three most popular development environments are the open-source Visual Studio Code and Notepad++. The most popular web browser was Firefox for a while, but even Chrome is based on a ton of open-source technologies.

Most people aren't picking these tools because they have some principled stance on free software, they're picking them because they're just plain better.

[scarface74]

How many of those products that you mentioned that are free are backed and for all intents and purposes controlled by commercial backers? Would the community maintain any of them to a re al degree if the backing company abandoned then?

[arctantwo]

Does it matter? If VSCode gets canned, or WordPress gets ruined, why should I, the user using the software to make a blog, give a damn? If VSCode goes there's another one I can switch to. If WordPress goes there's five million other blogging platforms I can switch to. The format that the content (i.e., the configuration, settings, presentation, etc) may all be proprietary, but so what? I have absolutely no allegiance to VSCode, MySQL, whatever. I just use the tool that made the most sense at the time, to accomplish what I wanted to at the time. Times change and if it means I switch tools then so be it. Who cares.

Edit:

I'm speaking from the perspective of an upper 20something. I'm part of a generation that jumps jobs when the opportunity is better, or just because "it's been too long", not the one of years past where I'd be expected to work my way through the same company my entire life. With that said: if my new job says "we use Slack" then I use Slack, end of story. If they say "we use IRC" then I'd Google for how to use IRC because I have never ever used it in my entire life, never read up anything about it in my entire life, and I definitely don't hold IRC in high reverence like many posters here do. All I can see when I google IRC is that it looks ugly and honestly, that's what's most important to me these days because I have to look at, and interact with, the thing for 8+ hours a day so the least it could do is work out of the box, look modern, and doesn't need me to waste hours fussing with some dotfiles to get it to look the way I want, which is exactly how most modern chatting apps look (again: to me it's a waste of time, when I can just grab a off the shelf solution).

I appreciate that there is open source, and that there are free programs out there. I appreciate all the libraries that make my life easier. But the thing is, these are all tools I use to do a job. I don't care at all about the history of say gcc. All I care is that it works and compiles my programs, and if it does, then so be it. And if it doesn't? There are other options, icc, llvm, etc. My point is that at the end of the day, all I want is a tool to achieve a solution, and who makes that tool, or the history behind that tool, doesn't matter to me at all. It's not even part of the equation.

[anonymou2]

I, I, I, I, I, all I care, .... that's really the problem that we face.

[Crinus]

> Who cares.

When the "new" tool is worse than the "old" tool, i care (and yes, the "new" tool can be worse - and often is - yet displace the "old" one, not because of its quality, but because of external reasons - like the developers of the "old" tool being unable to sustain its development).

[detaro]

> If WordPress goes there's five million other blogging platforms I can switch to.

Have you done a full migration of a grown Wordpress blog to another system, without breaking stuff? It's not something you do on a weekend or two. Changing away from a tool that holds lots of data and configuration is expensive.

[kazinator]

Or, regarding his other remark, a migration of hundreds of thousands of lines of code from gcc to something else.

[ahartmetz]

By the way, IRC doesn't look like anything. It's a protocol. It looks like your client software.

[pjmlp]

Yes it does, because someone has actually to do it and given how much FOSS developers get paid back from the community, we end up having lousy tooling, because it always gets implemented from scratch.

[jakelazaroff]

What if you're using a product and its community abandons it? This isn't a unique issue to products with commercial backers.

[kazinator]

Free software without a community is a thing; it's perfectly fine, and in fact better off without all the flies buzzing around it.

Proprietary software that is years past its support date, from a company that has not existed in years, yet still in use, is also a thing.

The one kind of entity that dies instantly when its backing goes away is a proprietary website.