this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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I am a strong supporter of open source tech. Specifically the proper FOSS flavor.
It is NEVER going to be a valid alternative when there is a massive multi-million (if not billion) dollar alternative with an affordable license. Because it takes time to develop these feature sets and time is money. Even someone working in their spare time can't put in a full day of work.. and are likely burned out FROM a full day of work.
And that ignores the tendency for GPL-like licenses that are straight up cancer as far as companies and products are concerned. I respect the ideology but... that is WHY companies are less likely to pull a Valve and dump massive amounts of money into supporting open source projects. Like, every time someone pushes a cool piece of software with a GPL-like license I just think "Cool, you are actively making sure your feature set never improves anything"
The best we can hope for is the model used by Ubuntu and the like. An open source project backed by a corporation that sells support. And... the open source community almost instantly turns on that and decides they are evil and starts going out of their way to shit on it at every step of the way.
As for the overall idea of "do we even own anything in this world of subscriptions?". That, much like with the "I bought the disc so I own this game" mindset is very much a fallacy. Because you can get a life time license to version 1.2315151651616 of FooSoft. hell, you can even get 1.x of FooSoft. That... doesn't matter because the moment a CVE is found in FooSoft or its dependencies you need a new version. Which is WHY we tend toward these subscription models because we know we need the updated version.
Like, as a good example: Basically ANY new hardware or software suite needs support for Red Hat, and to a lesser extent Ubuntu, if they are planning on selling their products. Because any company worth its salt is picking a distro with a support model. Which basically means RHEL and whatever the paid Ubuntu is. Because even ignoring any tech support aspects, a support contract is a guaranteed timeline for fixing vulnerabilities.
A universal basic income would allow more developers to choose to work on software they actually like, rather than the demands of business and their proprietary models.
Most UBI solutions (which I very much support and voted for Yang in the primaries for...) tend to be built around the idea of providing cost of living for "free" but encouraging people to still suck capitalism good if they want more money on top of that. Which is "good" because it is how you get those rock star developers focused on major products.
But that more or less makes the same problem. Sure, there are going to be people who genuinely want for nothing more than three meals a day and spend the rest of their time doing hardcore development. But, even then, they likely are never going to be "challenged". I've worked with some AMAZING developers over the years and have learned a lot from them. And I would hope they learned from me. Because, during a code review, you see how Nancy solved a problem and might try to incorporate that pattern into your own workflow and so forth.
But when you are more or less the sole "ninja" developer on a project and are mostly working with college kids who can remember what the various design patterns are called? You are likely not being challenged in the slightest and you "stagnate".
And most people who live and breathe "awesome code" are doing so because it lets them do fun stuff on the weekend. Which, until we live in a post scarcity society, needs money/resources.
Hell, if I haven't already pissed off more than enough people with this, I'll add on that I have never met what I would consider a "good" software engineer who doesn't "work for the weekend" as it were. Because if all you want to do with your entire life is code? You never stop iterating. You always want to make the code better and I need to regularly "check in" with you to make you push code to a repository or remove the WIP from your MR. Whereas the people who want to finish their job so they can go climbing or take a trip to the beach with their family or just blow money on hookers and blow? They are able to realize when something is "good enough for production" and they get a LOT more done.
There are free OS nowadays that are Better than the paid ones (especially the most used one for desktops).
What do you need your PC to do? If it's word-processing and spreadsheets you are already ready to go free. Other software or "solutions" will come later.
It just takes time because the money is pushing hard the payment models.