[anextio]

While I sympathize with your political position on free software, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that this point of view is idealistic[1] and short sighted.

The vast majority of engineers don’t commit to switching to free software not because not enough hearts and minds have been convinced yet but because the entire economy and the basis of everyone’s material existence depends on a system that is at this moment market-based.

The popularity of proprietary software stacks is ultimately structural, as are the problems and caveats of proprietary software. Engineers are, in the vast majority, dependent on selling their labor to the commercial employment market for their livelihood, in many cases an extreme amount of labor in a highly competitive environment.

It is absolutely great that many engineers dedicate free labor to contributing to free software, and it is completely unreasonable to expect that anything at all could make the vast majority do it. Not an unreasonable expectation of an individual, but of the structure.

[1] in the sense of philosophical idealism vs materialism

[ActorNightly]

The majority of web servers that serve all the web content that you use are Linux based.

Some of the most popular video games that have massive markets and revenues behind them (CounterStrike and moba games) have all started out as free mods to existing games.

The largest share of the worlds smartphones run Linux.

Twitch streamers, some of which make extremely high salaries, use open source broadcasting software

Python is now becoming the de-facto language of scientific computing, with all the major libraries available for free.

You are greatly discounting how much open source software has affected, and more importantly changed the direction of bought software.

[melenaboija]

I don't think anybody is doubting about the huge impact of open source in science and technology, is more that maybe linux is still not a substitute for some commercial products

[ActorNightly]

But...it very much is if you are looking at software that falls under the group of "operating systems".

There are use cases that realistically warrant enterprise software, but those stem from the argument of optimization of time - for example, not doing all your computation stuff in python with spending upfront time learning it when you engineers know Matlab. But those are not intrinsic to the software, it just so happens that Mathworks funds universities and pushes their product to be taught in classes, so that they can get revenue from companies buying licenses when their engineers enter the workforce.

If colleges switched to teaching with open source software, this would have zero net effect on the capability/knowledge of someone that graduates said program, because all the material is going to be new to him or her anyways. And, it would also increase the userbase of the software, and thus improve it.

[PeterStuer]

Meanwhile the entirity of AI and ML run on Foss stacks. Those engineers seem to do just fine.