| Oooooh yeeeaah, there it is. I was waiting for the ol' "don't reinvent the wheel". I'm just so dead tired of this argument. Why doesn't Mozilla give up on Firefox and just start contributing to Chromium? Why is Preact a thing when you could just contribute to React? Why do Grunt and Gulp exist, or WebPack vs Rollup? In my case, on many occasions, the thing I needed just didn't exist, in any form. Other cases, the thing I needed existed, but was poorly-written, or wouldn't integrate into my existing system. I'm just tired of the fundamental assumption from people arguing in these threads being "you didn't do your due diligence". You don't know the history of our projects, yet you come in here and tell us "you're doing it wrong". And this argument is so often used to ignore the work of solo-devs, yet completely get on board with big-name companies. I've literally had people tell me that I shouldn't have built Primrose, I should have contributed to A-Frame. A-Frame wouldn't exist for a whole year when I made Primrose. Was I supposed to just sit on my ass for a year and wait for "my betters" to make something that suited my needs? I've written my own text editor, too. Because there were no syntax-highlighting text editors that drew to HTML5 Canvases, which is what I needed to get code editing in WebVR to work. I've written my own ORM. Because at the time, there were no light-weight ORMs that were driven by the database schema for .NET. Microsoft didn't release Entity Framework for more than TWO years after I wrote my ORM. I'm currently writing my own VR/AR abstraction layer, because I don't like VRTK (it was legitimately junk when I first started, though I've been told it is better now, though it's not clear how) and Unity's cross-platform XR system (which also didn't exist when I started, and is also junk). I don't begrudge Mozilla making A-Frame. I completely understand that businesses are not going to want to play in someone else's backyard. But when I have a business doing something and I make the same decisions, I get replies from "the community" like yours. I begrudge people like you who have made FOSS into a cult of the giganto-corp. Why is the oneous on solo-devs to contribute? Where were the people telling Facebook to fix Angular instead of making React? |
I actually agree with you about most points, but the example was about text editors (and my possibly incorrect assumption was that this was about native text editors, not web abominations). There are plenty of those that are being developed already by solo devs, or at least noncommercially by communities. Contributing to those should be the default path unless there are very good reasons pointing in the other direction.