[Brian_K_White]

I'm not complaining about anything (other than the article, but not because they want to sell their software).

But is a fact that a lot of companies that want to straddle both sides of the fence, the open side is kinda crap. It's also true that a lot is not crap, but so what?

Another random example I happen to be familiar with, a long time ago a company essentially took over hylafax, and what do you know, ever since then the open parts got practically no useful or valuable advancement, and ifax commercialized such trivial to implement but end user valuable nicities as being able to associate a fax job with a db record. hylafax+ was forked and has been the good useful version ever since.

ifax didn't really hurt anyone since the fork was possible and actually happened, and has been great, but they didn't help either. they provide essentially no value to the open source ecosystem in trade for their ownership and commercialization of hylafax. I don't know if they ever tried to write a blog post like this one though. If not, then they were at least more honest, ish. It's not that honest to claim to be managing and caring for some open source project, while for some mysterious reason not accepting prs for features that compete with ones you sell in your commercial version of the same thing, for 20 years.

[ncruces]

You wrote: “lots of foss thats not useful or valuable to anyone, big or small.”

But you're not complaining.

[Brian_K_White]

No. That isn't complaining, that's observing.

I observe that there is crap, or that a certain set of incentives produces crap. So what?

What makes it not complaining is I didn't write a blog post about it to try to convince anyone of anything, and I'm just doing my own thing and don't care about them doing their thing, until they tried tondo more than that and also tried to convince everyone else to applaud them for it.

But if the question is raised to evaluate the situation as part of a discussion, this is my evaluation. That isn't complaining even if it is critiquing.

Here is what the real conundrum is about open vs proprietary software:

No one has to sell software to have roofs and bread, even while working on software as your living. You can live very comfortably, better than 80% of everyone around you, and all without any blown out knees, backs, ears, lungs, etc. Just doing support and custom work. You can have all the homes and cars and vacations and health insurance and kids educations you want, and no stress with cash in the bank and complete security.

But getting paid for work instead of paid for copies of work doesn't scale. In fact the fact that it doesn't scale is ecactly why there is enough to go around and everyone can have that life.

But you can never get a $billion unless you can do one days work for a cost of $1k and sell a million copies of it for $5k each. No one needs that, and no one deserves any pity that they want that and can't get it, EVEN IF someone like amazon can, using something you wrote and gave away no less.

Amazon can make a billion off of the same open source thing that you can't, but so what? Amazon also makes a billion off of driving their trucks on the road out in front of my house that I paid for with taxes. It doesn't change the fact that it's incalculably valuable to me that the road is there and usable by anyone. It has to be that wide open or else it's actually not valuable to me either, both directly and indirectly.

It's not a perfect analogy because they pay taxes too, except then again no they don't really, like all big companies they pay a tiny fraction of what they should and what you and I pay. And the maintenance of the road is more like the servers and stuff, the core value software would be the engineering knowledge how to build roads and maybe the road laying machines and the formulation of asphalt. Whoever did that work was just plugging away at their regular job and got a days pay for it. And so what?