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by delusional 1527 days ago
I don't agree. Most of the free software on my desktop was made by individuals who in their spare time. That doesn't mean they don't get paid way too little, so your points still stands, but i object to the "corporate charity" angle. Most corporations take way more than they give back.
2 comments
bborud 1523 days ago
Well, there are degrees. All the software I've written within recent memory (last 5-6 years or so) has software that was written by some commercial entity in its dependency graph. Usually as a direct dependency. Of course it varies how expensive it would be for me to replace that software. In some cases I'm sure I could find free alternatives, but it may not be as high quality, performant, correct or convenient to use. Which is another way of saying: it'd cost me more effort.

I can tell myself that I run my software on a free OS, but I know full well that much (if not most) of the heavy lifting on Linux was paid for by companies. Even in cases where the company isn't explicitly credited (as has been the case in several companies I've worked for that had people getting paid to contribute to the Linux kernel).

I'm sure I have written more trivial things in the past 5-6 years that has no external dependencies paid for by companies. Of course, if you ignore that the compiler, standard library, most of the toolchain and the IDE I use to write that software is all being developed by companies.

I bet that if you really were to look at what's between the pixels on your screen and the CPU, you'd probably find that most of the software you think of as written by individuals for free, results in code paths that spend a lot of time in code that was developed on some company's dime.

I'm also interested in what you mean by "most corporations take way more than they give back". Do you mean that monetizing free software is taking something away from free software?

As a thought experiment: imagine that no for-profit company were to use open source software at all. Do you see where I'm going? You do understand that there is a symbiotic relationship here, right?

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emteycz 1527 days ago
What OS do you run? I'd like that, but the only thing of this sort that has potential to be as usable as a Linux system is BSD, which doesn't run on my machines.

I hope SerenityOS takes off. It's looking good so far.

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