I regularly comment on the Internet on my views on most schemes proposed to fix FOSS problems. They are mostly negative. I think that most of these schemes cannot achieve any meaningful impact. It seems that most of these disagreements come from the fact that I seem to work on different models of how FOSS work. Over the years, I have tried to share parts of my model. This is part of this endeavor.
  • refalo@programming.dev
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it’s far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company.

    Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it’s nothing compared to the power that is accreted by the people who have co-opted that work thanks to the open source model. And then mark zuckerberg gets to define how the internet works despite having paid for almost none of the software that his company actually needed to make that work.

    It’s like feudalism or serfdom, these people did the work and got nothing for it. It’s like you took the worst aspects of capitalism for workers and the worst aspects of socialism for workers and put them together, that’s open source. You get no power and you get no money.

    It’s exploitative whether the people chose to be exploited, just because someone chooses to let you exploit them does not mean that you didn’t exploit them. And for the record that’s how most exploitation works; convincing people to do something that turns out to be very bad for them and very good for you, and that’s exactly what the open source movement has turned out to be.

    I really don’t see the “we post stuff on github under a gpl2 or lgpl or apache or mit license”, all that is to me now is just exploitation. You can say that there’s solutions but until someone demonstrates that those solutions work, it’s the standard “real communism has never been tried” argument. AGPL is the only thing that I’ve seen so far that’s an attempt to fix these fundamentally unfair compensation practices.

  • galaxy_nova@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    1 day ago

    Depends on your definition of winning. Lots of foss projects that look ugly and are not designed with ui in mind because it’s made by devs who are used to doing lower level stuff. Plus the fragmentation of qt and gtk. Winning would be easily building applications that could be native across DEs and actually look nice.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
      11·
      1 day ago

      Lots of foss projects that look ugly and are not designed with ui in mind because it’s made by devs who are used to doing lower level stuff.

      Maybe I am one of these developers because my domain is signal processing.

      I don’t care. I write mostly CLI apps.

      Plus the fragmentation of qt and gtk.

      I don’t care whether something is qt or gtk. I use what fits me. I might write a GUI in Swing or,JavaFX because it fits nicely with Clojure or Common Lisp on the JVM, or I might write a Rust app with a Racket GUI because it is actually native and cross-platform. It is so liberating not having to deal with corporate bullshit.

      It is not that I am an enemy of aesthetics. Actually, I like to do art! But I do that in wood and metal and other materials - not on the computer.

      Winning would be easily building applications that could be native across DEs and actually look nice.

      And about winning and having apps that suit your taste: Go ahead and write them. Scratch your own itch - that’s how great FOSS software is created. But don’t expect from others to spend THEIR free time on things YOU want. In return, you can do anything you like.

      • galaxy_nova@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Yes go and write them is the usual response to these and I understand the sentiment. But also one can’t rewrite many many complex apps by themselves. I understand people wanting to do whatever they want sure. My point is it wouldn’t be an issue as much if there wasn’t as much fragmentation. If it was easy to write for both qt and gtk at once then people wouldn’t have to complain about one or the other all the time. In order to have an actual change it has to happen as a community not as an individual. It’s great that people can write stuff in whatever they want, I like being able to try out different frameworks. But sometimes unification across the desktop is something some people want. I don’t think you can just invalidate what I’m saying with the just go write it then. It’s not like I’m going to devs GitHub’s and raising issues saying “write this in gtk right now!!!” And for the record I have the same problems with proprietary software too. I don’t use windows really except for work but it looks like dogshit and a cobbled together mess.

        • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
          4·
          18 hours ago

          But also one can’t rewrite many many complex apps by themselves.

          Well, ressources are limited. Especially the amount of stuff other people will do for free in their free time.

          My point is it wouldn’t be an issue as much if there wasn’t as much fragmentation. If it was easy to write for both qt and gtk at once then people wouldn’t have to complain about one or the other all the time.

          Specifically with this, I don’t see the issue. Qt apps run fine under GNOME and vice versa.

          But sometimes unification across the desktop is something some people want.

          Yeah but these same people are not going to do anything about it.

          In theory, it would be nice to get some solid public funding for making desktop apps more accessible. With our rapidly aging population in Japan or large parts of Europe, that would absolutely make sense. But I don’t see the job offers for SW engineers to do that.

          I don’t think you can just invalidate what I’m saying with the just go write it then.

          Well, I get that you want that.

          But who should do that? On whoms time? With which money? Or for free?

          Even things like the real time Linux project, which is extremely relevant for industry (including defense) is not funded in any sensible way.

          Myself, I am an expert in signal processing and renewable energy topics. It is extremely relevant for energetic independence of Europe, and climate protection. That’s not funded either. What is funded instead are “audio sound design” for combustion engine cars (that is, artificial simulation of engine noise). And this is bad politics - not something FOSS developers can solve by putting in more work for free.

          Now there are wishes that “open source developers” put more (free) work into software security. Who exactly should do that?

          I think most desktop stuff like KDE is done by people in their free time. They already do great work, including in the domain of UI. The negativity you transpire is unwarranted. These people do A LOT.

          These people have a life outside programning, other responsibilities, and other things to do. Complaining about them not doing even more work will not motivate them.

          • galaxy_nova@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            11 hours ago

            The issue is that qt looks out of place on gnome and vice versa for gtk. You don’t see the issue because you don’t care about ui consistency as much as i do. That’s totally fine. We’re different people with different opinions. That’s the great part about open source. Yes I understand these people have lives outside programming, I do as well. I’m appreciative of the work that people do on many of the big projects and tools that I use. But that’s not going to stop me from wanting or hoping that things will get better. I of course would like to have more designers involved in more open source projects. Also in regard to funding where do you think it’s gonna come from? If people don’t want stuff like a way to develop for multiple frameworks then why would there ever be funding? The only way to get stuff is for a lot of people to want something and to work towards it. Me advocating for this has nothing to do with “demoralizing developers.” Again I’m not going to those devs and saying “rewrite this” I’m simply advocating for things that I think would be beneficial. There’s no reason I can’t do that. I’m not sure why you’re trying to gate-keep my opinion behind “how dare you not be thankful, go and write it yourself!” We can disagree about how much we think it’s important but I’m still going to have my opinion.

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      Fortunately, there are plenty of foss projects with nice and intuitive UIs! (Okular, the PDF reader, Lutris, Firefox and its derivatives, Thunderbird, all the various Material You Android apps like Breezy Weather and AntennaPod, all the various SwiftUI Apple apps that are open-source like mLem and NetNewsWire, the bazillion apps that use libadwaita, all the Qt-based apps that fit really well with KDE Plasma, but work well in other DEs, Prism Launcher is nice to use, super easy to install Fabric mods, i could go on…)

        • sbird@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          2·
          12 hours ago

          Well it’s open-source now! Good for them. If you want more examples, you have a bunch of the self-hosted stuff (particularly Immich and Nextcloud, there’s plenty of great Jellyfin clients, loads of neat Navidrome/Subsonic clients, etc), LibreOffice/OnlyOffice (depending on whether you want separate office apps or integrated), you’ve got the Linux desktop environments (GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.), etc.

  • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
    23·
    18 hours ago

    I think that one reason why the proportion of open source code grows is software quality:

    Companies would love to own all their code. So, when they employ people who work on proprietary code, the amount of proprietary code should grow, shouldn’t it?

    Except that companies have mostly very short-term goals. And this affects quality: A lot of proprietary code has quite shit quality and is not really maintainable. Which has the effect that either the project dies, or becomes very slow to develop further, because of tons of technical debt.

    So, the company eventually will resort to rewrite that project. But that is like walking on a threadmill; it always takes a long time until a rewrite of an old project matches the predecessor projects features and stability. And the current GenAI craze will only make that threadmill rotate faster…

    FOSS projects do not have this obsessive constraint on short-term returns, so they often have better quality. Which makes it more likely that these projects live and prosper a bit longer. The short-term difference might not be even large - but the process goes year for year, round for round, and it becomes an evolutionary advantage.

    In the end, everyone uses that Finnish students former hobby kernel project, and nobody uses Windows 95 - or wants to use its shitty successors.

    (And this is why I also think that Guix will win in the long term: The capability to re-produce all components of a program or system from freely available source is, in the long run, an overwhelming evolutionary advantage.)