[hvasilev]

I'm not contributing to any free / open source projects.

I think that that FOSS is fueling the technology monopolies, despite originally aiming at the exact opposite. I think it has driven many software markets in the ground like for example tooling. I cannot believe that we use absolutely horrible software like GDB in 2020.

I think there is a lot of left learning ideology behind hte FOSS development and also these types of products have a limited way in which they can be monetized.

P.S. I know I'm gonna get a lot of hate, but I think that as a developer you can spend your time better elsewhere :)

[benibela]

I agree with that.

20 years ago I started using Delphi and it was great. The debugger then was much better than GDB is now; the form designer better than current ides; it compiles projects faster on 20 year old hardware than current languages compile on current hardware; with copy-on-write strings it basically had mutability xor aliasing for strings.

But no one wants to use Delphi anymore, because it is not open-source.

Unfortunately I made my projects open-source, and now need to keep maintaining them. But there is no advantage being open-source. There are almost no contributions, because no one knows Delphi/Pascal anymore. There are basically no maintained, working libraries to use. I have even ported my projects to FreePascal/Lazarus, the open-source Delphi alternative. But that made everything worse. Open-source is incredible buggy.

Things I had to deal with this week: Recent binutils versions have relro enabled by default, but their relro is not compatible with FreePascal. With relro enabled my apps do not start anymore. The string builder in FreePascal allocates buffers that are too small for its data. When GDB catches an exception in a GTK2 GUI while a menu is open, it freezes the entire X server. You have to leave the X server and kill gdb from another tty, before you can even move the mouse again.

[OrderlyTiamat]

Can you elaborate on how foss fuels tech monopolies? I've never understood that argument and would like to hear more.

[yc_2345]

GP has a good point.

Here is the general FOSS playbook of nearly every Big Tech company.

1 Use FOSS as a way to attract the best talent in addition to the salary. But remember that even a very high salary for a permanently scandalous company like Facebook may not be a good enough incentive, but FOSS will likely push some folks over the fence. ("Yes, I work for Microsoft. But inside Microsoft, I work on FOSS stuff!" - Scott Hanselman).

2 Get a lot of unpaid volunteers looking at and improving your code, not to mention the free documentation and all the free support on the project's GitHub issues.

3 Cherry pick the interesting stuff in the FOSS projects for BigTechCo employees and hand off the more boring plumbing work to the unpaid volunteers, thus massively increasing total FOSS output. This can often be done by simply ignoring the boring stuff for a while since it is quite clear that FOSS devotees abhor the code vacuum.

4 Back to step 1.

Yes, FOSS seems to be perpetuating the tech monopoly.

[hvasilev]

As a manager of a big tech company you are incentivized to increase profit and minimize cost. Might be slightly more painful to use a FOSS toolchain in your team, but your costs are zero. In comparison look at how much does a commercial IDE license like CLion costs per user.

It is a zero resistance environment. It gives the opportunity of the small to grow without any costs, but it also doesn't limit how big the big ones can get.

[brazzy]

Sorry, but that's complete nonsense in every aspect.

No competent manager will skimp on tools when they're paying today's developer salaries because those are the far bigger cost. You can buy plenty of expensive tools from the hourly rate equivalent of an engineer spending hours every week dealing with the shortcomings of crappy tools.

Conversely, a manager whose incompetence manifests as skimping on tools will just choose the cheapest commercial tool when there are no open source tools available, and that is almost guaranteed to be worse.

In fact, it's common for dysfunctional companies to insist on using commercial tools that are both very expensive and much more painful to use than readily available open source tools.

Edit:

> why is noone focusing on the fact that they are using software for free and profiting out of the product?

Because it is much better than having no free software and personal projects, self-study, and bootstrapped startups being only possible for the rich. I mean, there are Copyleft licenses that aim to prevent commercial use of free software, but isn't that exactly the "left leaning ideology" you didn't seem to like much above?

[OrderlyTiamat]

So if I understand correctly, the argument is that it drives down costs as opposed to proprietary alternatives. But how does this lead to monopolies?

Is it something like was suggested below by tsukurimashou, that companies takeover foss software so that it is essentially theirs? But I don't see how that is functional ly different from them just developing that software themselves (apart from higher costs for them). In this model at least everyone can see the source and has the freedom to use and modify as they see fit. I feel like there is still a step here that I'm missing.

[hvasilev]

It is a zero resistance environment. It gives the opportunity of the small to grow without any costs, but it also doesn't limit how big the big ones can get.

[OrderlyTiamat]

I see. To me that is then not something that would specifically lead to monopolies.

[tsukurimashou]

I think he means what Google, Amazon, Microsoft are doing, they pick open source software, they hire programmers to extend the projects and they make it their own

[TAForObvReasons]

In a competitive market, economic profit can be positive in the short run but will be driven to zero in the long run. FOSS is but one of many competitive forces. It just so happens that thee long-run state is when profit equals marginal cost, and for software that is zero ("free")

[hvasilev]

That is a hard theory to sell, since it happens only in places where the FOSS has established dominance and (for example) the state of the top contender is horrible. There is simply no economic incentive to pursue a better debugger.

[AstralStorm]

Yet Microsoft does so in Visual Studio, and apps like IDA Pro exist and are quite expensive. And there's a whole lot of proprietary ARM debugging platforms.

Even in FOSS there is also lldb and edb. (And gdb can be made more palatable by a front end such as ddd.)

[kasperni]

I hope you walk the talk and don't use any open-source software.

But regarding your claim about fueling the technology monopolies. In what way is everyone running Windows or OSX because there are no open-source alternatives less a monopoly?

[hvasilev]

When did I say I'm not using it? I said I'm not contributing to it.

[kasperni]

Right, so you use the free fruits of people's hard work.

And then you complain about them and their left-leaning ideology fueling technology monopolies.

[lidHanteyk]

Oh, so where do you spend your time?

[sbmthakur]

There are many Indie projects out there who have very less likelyhood of being taken over by a big org.