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by fractalb
1004 days ago
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> Absolutely. There's a lot of great open source software. >...but that's not 'open source winning', that's just 'people like free stuff they don't have to pay for or make any effort to get'. That's the most cynical take I have ever read about opensource software. I think you're measuring the success of opensource software by only the amount of software that you have to buy. IMO, that's not fair. Does the software that you buy today exist without opensource software? In a hypothetical case where your commercial software was built without any opensource software, do you think the price of that software would be the same as it is today? |
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Cynical? If anything it's the opposite of cynical. It's an idealistic view, and closely matches the spirit we had back when the FOSS movement caught on - and the idea about the kind of FOSS future that never came to be.
>I think you're measuring the success of opensource software by only the amount of software that you have to buy. IMO, that's not fair
Fair or not, that was exactly the vision of FOSS, even starting from the first anecdote about the origins of FOSS by RMS. It wasn't "let's build something Apple or Google can use as a backend for their closed software" or even "let there be a lot of FOSS in the world".
It's success was supposed to be measured by the overtaking of proprietary software, not assisting it, nor helping it behind the scenes as a server backend OS or service. And it's adoption at a mass level for the average user, giving them freedom, not as some niche for geeks. "Linux on the desktop", for example, was part of that dream, and it wasn't about "Linux being finally easy/good enough for some people's desktops", but about eclipsing Microsoft.