I’m so mad that my open source software made by a single developer in his free time who loves coding and helping other people is slightly worse in quality than a multi-million dollar dedicated project.
Exports into Maya-3D.Blend
Where’s the final panel where you find out it’s been abandoned and nobody else wants to work on it
I love open source.
On a related note, open source projects that get big without a reliable leadership organizational structure risk burning down just as easily.
Recently nix, wordpress, and gaggiuino were affected by this kind of thing. Nix seems to be recovering. Wordpress doesn’t look good. Gaggiuino skipped right over source-available and went closed-source.
Linux is a success story with this structure, but I think we need to be better about building projects with stability in mind.
For sure, long term sustainability is a big aspect of making open source great.
This is probably a minority opinion, but I think OSS prospers most when there is corporate muscle behind it.
A company with paid engineers that puts engineering time into fixing and bettering open source software can possibly be a good company.
Closed source ends up being the worst of all worlds. If there is an issue, you’re stuck waiting for someone else to possibly fix it. At least in open source, either you can try to fix it, or you can pay someone else to try to fix it.
At the end of the day, I think a lot of the Linux success actually comes down to this.
It’s much better to fund projects using a nonprofit foundation. There are plenty of examples of this. The problem with corporate muscle behind it s that development priorities end up being driven by the corporations doing the funding. In some cases, like the Linux kernel, there can be enough alignment so that it’s not problematic. However, Chrome is an excellent example of how corporate backed open source goes horribly wrong.
doesn’t have to be, it’s enough it’s not propped up by venture capital. all the results of enshittification are directly the result of venture capital wanting a 100x return on their investment.
a privately owned business that’s not focused on 100x-ing someones investment but content with the profit their enterprise generates (think Steam) is inherently good to its customers.
Like I said your mileage may vary, also even a good business like Steam can turn bad over time. That’s the fundamental problem with privately owned businesses. A lot of utterly deplorable companies today started out with the best intentions.
That relies on donations which may or may not come. I understand in a perfect world that makes sense, but in the real world even those foundations often rely on corporate muscle. Without that enterprise money, I’m not sure how they’d stand.
Perpetual licenses are dumb though. Software is a living breathing thing. Without developers it starts to die.
OSS software gets abandoned way more often than acquired proprietary stuff.
yes but the main point is anyone can pick it up again.
with proprietary it’s most often significantly more difficult and legally fraught if not near-impossible.
It’s not just a problem of stuff getting acquired. Companies exist to make money, and they have to chase new customers. No matter how good the software was originally, sooner or later you’re going to stop being the target demographic. This happens all the time, every single proprietary product I’ve used eventually changed in a way I did not want it to change. At that point I either have to adapt or find a new product. On top of that, companies go out of business all the time. At that point you lose support for your product, or if it’s an online service the product itself disappears.
With open source the situation is much better. As long as there’s a community of users who want it to work a particular way, then it’s always possible to fork it and keep it working the way you want. A perfect example of this was when GNOME started moving in a direction a lot of people didn’t like, and now we have Cinnamon and Mate desktops.
