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Comment on If Open Source is so great...

I’ve been thinking about this often lately as well. These fucking corporations with multiple billions at their disposal, and all they can produce is shit like Windows or macOS? AND it also costs money to use? AND it has ads in it?

Meanwhile a bunch of nerds working for free on a passion project are giving away software that is faster and easier to use and often more beautiful to look at.

I guess I’ve simply reiterated what the post image said, so ignore me maybe, but fuck this is depressing and disappointing. All these corporate resources and all they can do is barely achieve what other people do for free in their spare time? What a fucking waste of human life and energy is capitalism.

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dharmacurious@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Honestly, it’s such a compelling point to made for why capitalism is a shit economic system. Regardless of if someone is compelled by communist/anarchist economics, at the very least it should be obvious that capitalism produces only the most profitable products, not the best products.

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Takumidesh@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
For real open source projects, it’s a lot of the time not nerds working for free.

All your favorite frameworks and libraries are often developed in house at big companies (angular, react, vue, tensorflow, Kafka, pytorch, k8s, Jenkins, and many many more).

And even then, much of the development on them is done by people who are getting paid to use the frameworks at smaller companies.

There are tons of examples the other way too of course, but even the Linux kernel is mostly corporate commits, Google, Huawei, Oracle, and others.

This isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not as cut and dry as people make it out to be.

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- Zink@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That seems like the system working as intended. Once enough work has gone into open source projects, even the profit-driven entities see they will make more money by improving those open source projects instead of following their default plan of reinventing the wheel and keeping it proprietary and locked down.
  
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abfarid@startrek.website ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Technically, MacOS doesn’t cost money to use and has no ads.

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- fleg@szmer.info ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You need to buy an Apple-branded computer to use it (at least legally). It’s price is just included in the device you buy.
  
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  - abfarid@startrek.website ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Which is why I said “technically”.
    
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octopus_ink@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

I’ve been thinking about this often lately as well. These fucking corporations with multiple billions at their disposal, and all they can produce is shit like Windows or macOS? AND it also costs money to use? AND it has ads in it?

Not only do I agree with you, I also want to point out the telemetry whackamole for those who care. (And those who don’t care aren’t going to bother with the whackamole, but their privacy is being violated just the same as those who do care.)

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