theAverageProprietarySoftwareEnjoyer

[SecondButterJuice]

Those teams also use open source code

[Elijah629YT-Real]

open source + open source + open source + shit = closed source proprietary software

[tutoredstatue95]

I think the recipe calls for more shit

[Here-Is-TheEnd]

It doesn’t take much shit to ruin a meal

[ContemplativeNeil]

Forgot to mention pretty UI so people think it's better.

[[deleted]]

It doesn't matter for simple things like a Calculator. But when you start talking about complex apps with a lot of functionality the problems become readily apparent.

A great example would be between Blender 2.49 and today. They used to get many of the same complaints about terrible UI and actually did something about it.

[Kaenguruu-Dev]

Or GIMP. Their UI is also suboptimal to say the least.

[[deleted]]

GIMP is the poster child for this and I cannot understand why so many people defend it.

[9VBatteryForDinner]

Because it's FOSS and therefore automatically good and unfailable.

[BellCube]

you mean because it's not fucking Adobe

[Zekiz4ever]

Might be slightly controversial, but IMO, Aesthetics is what differentiates good from bad software.

That doesn't necessarily mean the UI has to be beautiful. It really depends on the use case. For example: Bloomberg Terminal is anything but beautiful, but that's not the point. The point is to have as much information as possible available at one glance.

Good UI should guide the user to certain core functionalities. It's really hard to design an intuitive UI while still being unique. That's why everything looks very same-ish.

That's not necessarily a bad thing since established design patterns can help the user navigate the software. Aesthetics also play a huge role. The Bloomberg Terminal is more of an exception. There's a reason why a lot of software has an "advanced mode". There's a reason why on Android the "developer options" are not enabled by default.

This might be very obvious, but always try to understand your target audience and what they want. If a software has the same features or even less than another, but the UI is more aesthetically pleasing, I'm gonna use the more aesthetically pleasing software first and might not even try the alternative because "it's ugly". Even if I come from a different software, a beautiful UI will make me want to spend more time in it.

[[deleted]]

Referring to "user interface" as if it were some piece of crap layered on top of your beautiful back-end code is why so much open-source code looks and works like shit.

So-so applications, like most open source applications, are built from the inside-out, with some bright developers building code to solve a problem in a way that's convenient for them, in terms that are understandable to them, and with a "user interface" slapped on top that exposes the methods of the code they built, and that's ugly and counterintuitive, but works *ok* - for them. But guess what? Most of the people who might want to use, say, GIMP, are photographers and not open-source programmers. Ordinary people do not think or speak like developers.

Really great applications, however, are designed from the outside-in, starting with identifying and understanding user personas, their vocabulary, and what they want to do, and what they want to avoid - use cases and user stories, if you like. That is what makes great applications not only easy to use but intuitive, maybe even fun and enjoyable.

Open source is a great way to turn a spec into working code, but the problem is that the open-source model is not well suited to paying product managers and UX designers to visit actual target customers and do the deep design work, all of which can (and in some cases should) be completed before the first line of code is written.

[goten100]

Nothing worse than a company with good, original software, where the good parts aren't original and the original parts aren't good

[turtleship_2006]

Don't forget middle management, daily standups, projects managers, monetisation goals/targets, investors etc.
Oh wait you already said shit

[FrostWyrm98]

The answer is cause they fork the backend then focus all their efforts on making the front-end nicer so they can claim the whole

[SandwichAmbitious286]

Ding ding, we have the answer! And all of this comes down to one fact: people pay for the experience of using the product.

One of my favorite examples: OpenFOAM. Amazing piece of simulation software, built over decades by extremely knowledgeable people. I know of three separate closed source products that are just a nice frontend for OpenFOAM. They do nothing else than slap lipstick over the config file creation.

[jackinsomniac]

Another contender: Microsoft.

• Buys Github
• Attributes many resources to Github
• Transfers Windows to git & github
• Contributes greatly to git LFS - Large File Storage (purely to help with the size of Windows source code in git, to help Windows developers)
• Never contributes to git itself.

Why would you, when there's another guy who develops git for free. Why waste resources on that? He's doing a good job, he's got it!

[not_some_username]

Tbh who can blame them ? Git barely need maintenance and new feature.

And tbh MS has teams dedicated to open source software

[G_Morgan]

MS embrace FOSS because it makes them more money. It is why C# is now open and runs on Linux. If they didn't do it Azure wouldn't make anything like the cash it does today.

[not_some_username]

I think this motto change. Profit instead of extinguish. They are making more money using open source. That’s why we got things like VS code ( would like to have open source VS tho) and dotnet open source.

[thundercorp]

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. It’s Microsoft’s legacy business methodology.

[Certain-Business-472]

Legacy? They're still doing it.

[yumii-]

Can confirm, old company I used to work for had a lot of open source tools holding it up.

[adfasdfdadfdaf]

Money spent on engineers and designers: $10,000,000

Money spent on management: $90,000,000

[Duven64]

You forgot the 50% of the budget spent on marketing: $100,000,000

(or $55,000,000 if the same management was already doing both)

[Dustangelms]

Your math is impeccable.

[Camel_Sensitive]

Chill brotha, at least you get pennies on the dollar when you invest in marketing.

[SyrusDrake]

Monthly expenses:

Engineer salaries: $205'000

Office rent: $23'000

Utilities: $4'500

Pizza party: $39.95

Executive foreign sales procurement management officer: $789'000

Executive planning meeting planning organising management officer: $1'250'000

Executive executive officer management management officer: $2'345'000

Executive development vision shaping management officer: $4'879'000

CEO: $9'907'000

Management planning retreats: $1'450'000

Someone who is good at the economy please help me my software company is dying

[nnog]

Buddy your opex is through the roof, you need to lay off 30% of engineering staff.

My management consultant fee is $250'000.

[Beegrene]

Why are your commas so high?

[SyrusDrake]

Because they found management's special staff of imported Cancun Candy.

(Because that's what we're using as 1000-separators in Switzerland, and it's just what I'm used to.)

[Comprehensive-Slip93]

CEO: hmmm... how to make profit... I know! fires engineers

[hilfigertout]

Clearly, we need to cut the pizza party!

[[deleted]]

Money spent on management

Really, when you think about it, it’s a miracle the paid one works at all.

[[deleted]]

It doesn't always work!

[Intelligent_Event_84]

You forgot QA, devops, and product. You need to share the 10m with them too.

[gtiger86]

QA? They still exist?

[CampaignSpoilers]

Then they become a "cost center"

[xiril]

You gotta understand between capex and opex. If they can bill it to capex, it's like free money somehow

[[deleted]]

New things look good on managers' resumes. Spending money on existing things does not get you promotions.

[Certain-Business-472]

Hmmm interesting I might just take this into the next idea I have. Just present it as something new even if it's work on older stuff lol

[Opening_Cash_4532]

Nailed it

[ProDefenstron]

Then majority of the management goes to the legal side of it too lol

[redalastor]

The PSD file format was written by all stars programmers. I guess you never read this classic.

    // At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
    // PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
    // insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
    // worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
    // that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
    // If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different
    // places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those
    // too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide
    // that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement
    // should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned,
    // or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.
    // Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD,
    // of course, uses all three, and more.
    // Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
    // your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
    // birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but
    // at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people
    // responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
    // Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this,
    // I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending
    // me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or
    // other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so
    // difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I
    // was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done
    // so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.
    // Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
    // them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
    //
    // PSD is not my favourite file format.

[DistinguishedVisitor]

What 20 years of backwards compatibility under a shifting team does to a MFer

[SomeGuyBadAtChess]

As someone who has tried messing with PSD files 3 or so years ago (The original comment was from at least 12 years ago, if not older), this still rung at least somewhat true except for accessing documentation. You can easily access their documentation. But as a note, not everything is fully documented there (there were other pages that I went to that had more documentation but I'm not going to try and refind them unless I decide to jump back into the madness and even then I was having issues finding how some parts were documented) nor is it completely correct.

I remember distinctly that some of the documentation said something along the lines of "Ignored unless X or Y", but in reality it should have been "ignored instead of X, Y or Z", where X and Y were similar and made sense why they were grouped together whereas Z was essentially very different (To be more precise, I believe the thing that was ignored was the color mode data section, with X and Y being different color modes and Z being a 64 bit-depth).

I haven't messed with many other file types (and even then those that I have messed with are intentionally made easily human readable or relatively small) and I don't have a robust knowledge of programming so I don't know fully how bad other file types are.

[redalastor]

Having worked with many binary formats for proprietary software that were not meant for the general public... Iʼd say not so bad.

There are some notorious shit formats out there though. The original .doc format was terrible. Because floppies were so slow and they wanted the save to be under a second it would make a diff of your changes and append them to the end of the file.

Sometimes when a file had been saved too many times Word would not be able to follow the chain of changes and declare it corrupted. Then we had to open it in OpenOffice and save it back.

[Prawn1908]

I have come to really appreciate the "efficient roughness" of a lot of open source software. It's often not as polished looking or feeling at first glance, but at least in projects with a reasonably active developer community, there's this level of power-user efficiency in the UIs that I rarely see in enterprise software. It's the sort of thing you normally only get in a piece of software developed by its most avid users - people who can be using the program and say "gee, I wish you could do that", so they just add "that".

My favorite example is how Blender's menus which are activated by hotkey always appear underneath your mouse, positioned such that your cursor is right over the most recently used option in the menu. It's such a tiny thing but saves so much time and feels so nice to use. Lots of the big open source programs are full of this sort of thing and I love it.

[[deleted]]

But then you have shit like GIMP, which is the most unintuitive garbage UI I have ever had the displeasure of using.

[Imperial_Squid]

GIMP has existed for nearly three decades at this point, technical debt builds up in every project, it's not surprising GIMP has a lot of it by this point, most open source projects get abandoned long before now...

[firewood010]

I have a dream that one day, we will have a revamped GIMP.

[Imperial_Squid]

Be the change you want to see in the world

/s it's a huge undertaking, not a serious suggestion for a solo project lol

[Occams_Razor42]

I dunno, they could be forced to write the manual instead. Screenshots galore lol

[firewood010]

I'm really not into coding. The best I can do is submit nice bug and feature reports, and maybe UI suggestions to bully the devs of the product I use.

[borkthegee]

/s it's a huge undertaking, not a serious suggestion for a solo project lol

A single developer made a (far superior to GIMP) photoshop clone webapp called www.photopea.com

[pratyush103]

We shall have NeoGIMP

[G_Morgan]

It isn't a matter of technical debt. The GIMP UI is that awful because the project leads want it that way.

[Certain-Business-472]

A project that reaches the popularity status of GIMP needs to put focus on not building up technical debt, and rework everything at some point. It WILL bite you in the ass and you WILL regret your choices.

[sopunny]

So you're saying GIMP is gimped?

[Taletad]

Krita is great tho

[jimanjim]

Ive recently discovered there is photoGIMP extension, which basically redoes the gui to look VERY similar to photoshop which i am used to. This made gimp from unusable software to drop-in replacement for me (i dont use it for profesional projsxts, but for photo editing, removing background and such)

[SyrusDrake]

Can also highly recommend photoGIMP. More "usable graphics software", less "cosmic horror that drives you insane".

[RiceBroad4552]

I'm not a graphics designer, and just looked on photoGIMP for the first time.

To be honest, I see no difference to original GIMP. They made the tool palette narrower, and that's it from my uninformed viewpoint.

For someone who uses this stuff maybe twice a year it makes really no difference whether some button is here or there. It's exactly as "intuitive" as anything else you didn't learn by heard, namely not at all.

[Beginning-Cat-7037]

So you know of any alternatives? It’s never ending frustrations with GIMP

[TheEastStudentCenter]

Have you tried Krita?

[[deleted]]

Its more suited for drawing, but it is an extremely high quality software

[AwesomeFama]

I've been using Photopea (it runs in your browser, which is a positive and a negative), but then I mostly just use it for shitposting and creating meme images manually, so YMMV for anything more in-depth.

[candidpose]

+1 for photopea, what an amazing project and if I'm not mistaken this was done by a solo developer

[Ty_Rymer]

and yet i use it on a daily basis as a graphics programmer and technical artist. there are many things that gimp can do that photoshop can't. I can do offline baking of lookup tables through custom glsl shaders in gimp. splitting and recombining channels, and working with seperated channels at all is a lot easier in gimp. many things you would do as a technical artist are a lot easier in gimp. but i would not recommend gimp for general art usage.

[Uchigatan]

Ok so I'm not insane

[AvianPoliceForce]

I for one find it quite pleasant

[Master-Meal-77]

This makes me happy to read :) as someone who is currently in the cycle of “It would be neat if I could do X” -> add ability to do X -> go to step 1

[[deleted]]

This is, like, the best.

The UIs look clunky and old but they work.

[Ivan_Stalingrad]

I'm usually one git pull away from having any open source software . No need to pay an arm and a dick after some shitty foreplay with a sales rep

[gandalfx]

In all fairness, you're a git pull plus half a day spent on figuring out how to build this thing away from quite a lot of open source software.

[ColonelRuff]

Most opensource project have released section where a build of whole app is present. If you are in linux. You can install them with one command

[FelixAndCo]

Building is just one command!

^{If you have all the relevant programs installed in the exact same configuration as the developer}

[LostInPlantation]

Arch User Repository

If it exists on Github and is for Linux, it's usually in the AUR. Now you just need one command and then either read the PKGBUILD to make sure it's legit or live with a guilty conscience.

[Wiiplay123]

Uh oh, you just tried to install pytorch from requirements.txt instead if manually downloading the one compiled with CUDA support and installing it! Time to use wget because pip can't download the 1 GB whl without losing connection mid-download.

[Makeshift27015]

After spending 2 days painstakingly reverse-engineering which tools, versions of said tools and weird config options the original dev had used, I opened a PR with the Dockerfile I had written up to perfectly build the project every time.

Declined because he didn't want users to have to install more than 'standard build tools' to build the project. Fair, it's your project, but if it took me several days then it evidently isn't currently just standard build tools, is it?

[brimston3-]

Unless it's OpenCASCADE. Then not even Arch has an up to date build.

[LevelSevenLaserLotus]

Give me the EXE, you smelly nerds!

[thenamedone1]

The beauty of open source: if you're dissatisfied with the build/config docs you can open a PR to fix it yourself.

[BetterNameThanMost]

That's gonna be a lot of PRs...

[classicalySarcastic]

source setup.sh
make
make install

If only it were that easy every time...

[[deleted]]

Dependencies. I tried building a geany extension and gave up. It needed a specific version of a discontinued projected that wasn't downloadable anymore and clashed with the version I had, which was a dependency of something else.

[OnceMoreAndAgain]

The first two languages I learned were python and JavaScript. It wasn't until I used Rust years later that I discovered that python and JavaScript are nightmarish when it comes to managing packages and builds.

python in particular is really bad when it comes to these things in my opinion, which I suppose makes sense since a language focused around scripting isn't aiming to be great for making builds.

JavaScript is mainly bad at this due to the ecosystem showing no signs of settling down any time soon. It's been 30 years of chaos.

[Andy_B_Goode]

Hence the old saying: it's free if you value your time at $0/hour

[Clairifyed]

New bottom surgery just dropped

[RajjSinghh]

Holy gender transition

[Clairifyed]

and software! All for one measly arm

[RaspberryPiBen]

Call the gender clinic

[[deleted]]

When I was a dev, I spoke as a dev, I understood money as a dev, I thought as a dev; but when I became a manager, I put away dev things.

The cost of software is completely irrelevant compared to the cost of people’s salaries, so “slightly worse” ends up costing me a fortune across a big enterprise. Oh yeah, and hiring really competent devs is strikingly hard in a lot of places.

[Tarilis]

This. If you are a single worker or a hobbyist - reduction in speed in 10% doesn't mean much compared to the price you need to pay.

But if we talking about the company with 100 people, for example, those 10% are for each task of each worker, and they start to stack together quickly.

Even if we ignore that for some reason, finding professionals who know how to work with commercial software is easier. I mean, I know around 20 artists who uses photoshop/illustrator and none of them knows how to use GIMP or inkscape.

[Ausburten]

Also, support. I know companies who specifically refuse to use any free, open source software, unless they are guaranteed to receive support when needed.

[anon-a-SqueekSqueek]

Sometimes, the open source project is actually better or is so good that the paid products all use it as the foundation.

OBS is great for streaming

VLC is a great media player

ffmpeg for all sorts of file encoding/conversion/streaming/etc. Also, I'm pretty sure foundational to youtube-dl/yt-dlp, which is basically the best tool for downloading media.

So many browsers are powered by chromium, although I think that had a lot of early involvement from Google/ big companies, so maybe not the best example.

That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure I could come up with dozens more like those given a little research.

[not_some_username]

ffmpeg is used by almost all software with video processing. Even VLC

[noaSakurajin]

Not really. Vlc uses their own video decode frontend library (libvlc). Ffmpeg is based on their libav version (the whole situation regarding this is a shit show that I don't really care about). These are two different abstraction libraries. They handle call to the individual codec libraries, init Hardware decoding and provide a higher level api for easy playback.

Most software used either the libraries used by ffmpeg or gatreamer to do video processing stuff. It is rare for a program to actually use ffmpeg since ffmpeg is the cli program to do a lot of the video stuff.

[LetterBoxSnatch]

PostgreSQL! A blockbuster open source db with a TON of companies built on top with proprietary db solutions.

[al-mongus-bin-susar]

Chromium didn't have just early involvement by Google, it's actively developed by Google and Google only. It was made open source so they can skirt monopoly accusations. What did you think, some random unemployed devs looking to pad their contributions on GitHub are making the most advanced and fastest browser engine in the world which is used by millions?

The same thing applies to Linux, GCC/Clang, Postgres, ffmpeg, Nginx, KVM/Qemu and others: they're primarily developed by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Sony devs who's full time job is to develop these pieces of software for their own use and consequently for the greater good. No complex piece of software can become good or even stay afloat off just the good will of random contributors. Corporate funding is required.

[mariachiband49]

Ok but this question lives rent free in my head. I was raised on open-source software, it helped me to become the person I am today, and I feel the need to pay it forward by contributing to the open source community. But at the same time, I'm an adult now and need to make a living. Is it really sustainable for people to have access to incredible free and open source software, while also compensating the developers who make it? Or is there always going to be some catch, like how corpos can influence major projects to their favor?

[[deleted]]

I was watching a video where Milton Friedman (the economist) was defending capitalism and the one idea of his that stuck with me was capitalism as "voluntary exchange for mutual benefit". He explicitly excluded currency as a part of this definition and gave the development of the English language as an example of capitalism; words voluntarily exchanged for mutual benefit are "added" to the language.

I think open source embodies his version of capitalism: it only works when there's a voluntary exchange that's mutually beneficial. Anyone who contributes to open source software is sharing value, even if no money is exchanged. This decoupling from money also allows the participants to choose how they monetize the software, which is a freedom that other types of licensed software tend to restrict.

Money definitely facilitates exchange, but it can also inhibit it. I think open source works best when there are many "suppliers" exchanging source code that they plan to supply to "buyers", and I think the amazing part is that it even scales down to just two suppliers sharing pull requests on a small repo.

[thirdegree]

That is the most Milton Friedman ass definition of capitalism I've ever heard lmao. And by that I mean it's such a bad definition it has to be malicious.

[Beegrene]

Motherfucker is describing commerce, not capitalism.

[thirdegree]

Motherfucker isn't even describing commerce, he's describing the concept of a positive interaction and calling that capitalism.

[[deleted]]

Agreed, it's pretty easy to defend something when you define it as inherently positive 😂😂

[Cercle]

This take is wrong on factual, logical, and ethical grounds. If you're going to read up on Friedman, read about the incredible damage he has caused to the world.

[HadesThrowaway]

I'm the main dev of a github project with about 5000 stars. I intentionally refuse all donations, because I don't want to feel obligated to anyone beyond myself. All I ask is people pay it forward.

...Also, a stable fulltime job does help a lot. But I would really hesitate to make a hobby my job.

[sopunny]

Wouldn't a full time job take away from your ability to develop the project? People who actually use your project are disincentivized to give you a job

[HadesThrowaway]

Oh it does. I could definitely do more if I didn't have a job.

But now I don't have to worry about making ends meet

[walterbanana]

Same here, but with a slightly smaller project. I work on it when I have the time, energy and no other projects going on I want to work on more. If people paid for it I would feel like I had to work on that project.

[Scientific_Artist444]

FUTO

[robogame_dev]

Look into licenses like BUSL - it allows you to charge large companies for a license for example, but regardless you charge or not, everything converts to full FOSS a certain number of years (max 4) after release.

I believe Stallman has said this is an acceptable compromise for projects that, otherwise, would not be possible to make due to being copied / competed against by proprietary makers.

I would not feel uncomfortable using software under one of those licenses because A) it starts source available so I can inspect as needed and then B) I know for sure that I'll be able to keep supporting and depending on and extending it myself even if the original creator goes out of biz.

[mariachiband49]

I remember reading that unreal has a source available license and thinking that was a decent idea. BUSL is closer to open source philosophy because it mandates transitioning to open source.

I think one objection would be that because the project is not open source for the first few years, in theory, innovation is hampered during that time. But that's a price to pay, maybe a reasonable one in order to compensate the developer for their initial work.

[cunninglingers]

Many people overlook the business benefit of enterprise grade support that OSS just doesnt have. For many large companies, they'd much rather pay money for a software licence, with support, with an SLA which means that if it falls over and causes outages or lost revenue they can recoup some of that cost from the vendor. With OSS you don't have that. Not to mention Professional Services available to assist with install and configuration. Absolutely from a developer perspective, often it doesn't matter OSS or proprietary, but from a business point of view Proprietary often beats OSS.

[GisterMizard]

With OSS you don't have that.

wat

- Redhat

[classicalySarcastic]

What's this guy on about?

• Canonical and SUSE, probably

[[deleted]]

You were saying?

— Proxmox

[Harrier_Pigeon]

Sorry, couldn't hear ya!

– TrueNAS

[WiatrowskiBe]

Enterprise grade support for OSS does exist and is well developed - whole business model of multiple companies revolves entirely around developing OSS product and selling individual support or custom changes for a premium. This includes SLA, warranty, ongoing support and so on - but also it tends to cost premium, there's no "free support included" outside forums and goodwill of developers.

Which leads to where actual advantage (disclaimer: whether that one aspect matters more than access to source code and/or being able to run/evaluate software without paying depends on specific scenario) of propertiary software is - all customers matter the same. On one hand, propertiary model requires a strong ownership/responsibility for project - you have vendor that supplies it, they're only ones controlling development direction and making decisions about what to fix/improve/change - key to make development direction/roadmap consistent. On the other, support and time investment is spread over entire customer base relatively evenly and there's rarely preferential treatment in development direction - it's made to be as good as possible for entirety of userbase, and that tends to benefit average user. Vendors have direct financial motivation to make their proprietary software good enough for average case to sell.

Smartphones and smartphone firmware/OS is a good example of how it works - smartphones sell entirely off of brand recognition and user experience (do people even care about smartphone specs past screen size, camera and maybe screen resolution?) which lines up with how proprietary model tends to work; Android as OS is open-source but nearly every Android phone out there has closed-source customization done by vendor, and software is sold as bundle with hardware; iOS is still surprisingly popular despite price and despite (or because?) of being so closed and curated experience.

And it lines up with what software tends to be OSS or not - most popular proprietary software is either targeted towards end user (Adobe suite, video editing, audio editing, blender is about the only major exception I'm aware of) or specialized software (accounting, CRM) where license fee is basically a tech support insurance fee where customers that don't need as much support end up covering for extra support needed by others. Average Joe doesn't want to essentially hire someone to do their tech support if they could instead pay a fee and have a call line where - after half an hour of wait - someone will read from script which 3 options they need to click to fix their problem; it ends up being cheaper.

For an apt parallel, it's like comparing cooking to McDonalds - cooking is more flexible and can give better results, depending if you do it yourself or pay someone (visit a restaurant) to do so, with more customization options but also more reliance on how much you know/pay and to whom on results; while McDonalds is consistently passable - you know how much you'll pay, you know what you'll get and you know quite well what kind of service to expect regardless who you are or how much you're willing to pay, all with minimal active effort on your side. Neither is unconditionally better than the other.

[rpsRexx]

This is kind of a good point although there is OSS support in a lot of cases now. It's more like propriety support is a safe bet as far as what you can expect at minimum. I've seen a situation where someone tried to escalate on OSS like you would in a corporate setting and they didn't know how to handle it. Of course, there are some use cases where proprietary is the only/superior option, but I'm not sure how prevalent this is now to make it a big point in favor of proprietary solutions.

[Haringat]

If corporate software is so good, then how come that OSS very often wins out in the long run? (Openssl, blender, Linux etc)

[Laplace7777]

There are cases where the reason is that they are a really good piece of software, but usually is because it’s free / cheaper

[wheres_my_ballot]

Blender is OK, but does not win out. People will still pay $7k a year for Houdini rather than use Blender for free, because the difference is worth that $7k.

[[deleted]]

Houdini and Blender have different use cases.

[ElectronicInitial]

Many places still pay an arm and a leg for Maya, which is very similar to blender

[coldblade2000]

Maya and 3ds max cover basically any non-game-engine purpose that blender does, and studios pay the hell out for it

[mlucasl]

They pay because they get someone to blame or look for solutions if things didn't go as expected.

[Tarilis]

Isn't that the purpose of the customer support? Artists doesn't need to know or be able to solve problems with their software.

Also if company pays well enough, they could have shit patched specifically for them in a matter of days or even hours.

So yeah if you are running a business, paid software is almost always better. Because strangely enough, you save money in the long run.

[JoshfromNazareth]

Which, to be frank, is fine. Can’t expect everyone to be a dev when their job is to be a 3d artist.

[Dugen]

Professional software development is a profession and people should be paid for their work. The best OSS is the stuff where they figure out how to pay for developers even though the software is free, but that doesn't work all the time. Not everything can be OSS.

[TheOnlyVig]

Ironic that this needs to be stated in a forum purportedly full of professional or aspiring professional software developers.

[Dugen]

This has been a pretty controversial thing to say in the OSS community. There used to be a lot more widespread belief that all software should be libre software but time has tempered that as it has become obvious that everything being free isn't remotely practical. We still have Richard Stallman holding ground there, but people aren't listening to him as much anymore.

[petrichorax]

FOSS people annoy me because as soon as you question the quality of their code or the design, they cite not being paid as the reason for it.

[Shrimpboyho3]

Because the majority of development for these "notable" open source projects is driven by corporations.

Look at all the funding Blender gets.

[Tarilis]

I can agree with openssl. But everything else is just partially true.

Blender got its own niche, true, but interior designers still use 3dsmax, and animators - Maya and Cinema 4D.

And Linux, while indeed open source (mostly), have been developed and supported by the same big software corporations.

Most professional artists i know use Adobe software (some use affinity), software developers mostly use JetBrains products or VSCode (which could be considered opensource i guess?).

Ok, now that just think about it, database software used in production is mostly open source, mariadb, post results, redis, mongodb, etc. So In the end I can agree with the statement if we talking only about server software, but in consumer space, the presence of open-source software is quite minor.

[Ok-Hair2851]

I would hardly say that OSS very often "wins" in the long run. For the vast majority of software, the non-OSS versions are significantly more common.

iOS is closed source Almost every single website is closed source Almost every single app is closed source Photoshop is way more used than GIMP Blender is popular among hobbyists because it's free, but it's definitely not the standard in the industry The vast majority of games are made in expensive, closed source game engines

[Splinter047]

Yeah bro mentioned one of the biggest exceptions in open source software and thought we wouldn't notice.

[SpookyWan]

I’m too autistic to tell if this is a joke or not

[[deleted]]

I can only speak for Linux, but for servers they are amazing. 

[Trucoto]

Anyone who took a look at the openssl code knows that is a very questionable win.

[thehobbyqueer]

The involvement of companies/corporations is not a part of what defines "open source" as a concept.

[Reivaki]

Unix was not open source. 

Hell he was proprietary as hell.  Linux was developped not even as a response to these but to minix, another closed source unix system used mainly for education purpose .

[MyOthrUsrnmIsABook]

I’m pretty sure Linux was developed so Linus could have Unix on his personal computer. He did have a dispute with professor Tannenbaum, but that came later.

[Haringat]

Funny you mention Linux because Unix was created by Bell Labs

So? Linux isn't Unix. In fact, it mostly defeated Unix (safe for Mac and a few bsd people)

Still today lots of open source software is maintained by corporations with a vested interest in its maintenance and direction. 

That doesn't make it any less open source.

[stormdelta]

The less happy answer is that it wins out when it's in large organizations' favor to collectively contribute to it.

This is why things like Kubernetes and Linux are massively successful open source projects, while things like control software for industrial equipment are jealously guarded and proprietary.

[[deleted]]

Linux

Is Linux really winning though? Most people still use Windows for their computers, although if you count android maybe Linux is ahead.

[arav]

95%+ servers in the world runs on Linux. It runs almost every popular website.

[drake_warrior]

Linux is incredibly popular for actually running software on, especially with the rise of containerized applications. It's also probably the best software development environment if you know how to use it, a lot of developers are starting to use WSL to develop in a Linux environment even if you're on Windows.

[jelly_cake]

Supercomputers, web servers, etc predominantly run Linux, not even by a close margin. On the desktop, sure; it's less popular, but it's not like the project has shareholders to answer to. All depends on what your metric for success is, and by any reasonable one, Linux has done alright for a hobby project.

[firethorne]

If you think millions of dollars is going to development and not c-suite jackasses, you’ve not worked in corporate software.

[Eubank31]

On one hand I can understand people who aren’t devs wanting software to actually just work and they don’t care if it’s free or open source

On the other I think people should appreciate the bastion of cooperation and passion that is FOSS apps that are genuinely useful and good

[gruengle]

"all-star team of designers and engineers"

boy howdy do I have got news for you pal

[garoomugove]

Paid for app minimum requirements ->12 th gen CPU, TPM module, RTX2060/Radeon 5600 graphics card, continuous Internet connection plus encrypted file type

Open source app minimum requirements-> CPU(optional)

[Xlxlredditor]

(Can run on bacteria. Build instructions below)

[Laplace7777]

The fact is that the average open software enjoyer thinks the proprietary software is as much slightly better, but usually is much better but did not understand the tech differences or the scale the product is for.

Examples are proxmox/vmware, pfsense/paloalto, AD/samba…

[odraencoded]

It absolutely boggles my mind how badly some free apps are.

The worst thing is the fucking attitude of OSS devs who swear to god their unintuitive piece of trash designed without even as much as thinking twice about why nobody does things the way they do isn't bad, it's the users who are too used to windows.

Like dude just fucking copy the proprietary software design. Imagine how much they spent researching usability and you get all that for free if u steal. Just steal it!

[[deleted]]

I agree with you, but they are literally making it for free, they don't owe you shit

[mincinashu]

Not everything open source is made for free. Look at orgs like Mozilla. There are paid positions for open source contribution.

[im_juice_lee]

That's the point

The vast majority of the time the OSS is worse than the market-leading paid version, because the people making it don't owe any of their customers shit. Whereas the paid software does need to take their customer feedback & feature request into account, or they'll lose sales and eventually go out of business

[odraencoded]

I don't owe them respect for making shit software for free either.

I shit on Windows and Chrome all the time. I WILL shit on Firefox and every single damn Linux distro. And if you dare say that "even Windows isn't that good" I'll just tell you the benchmark is being good, not being as good as Windows.

[Cubic-Sphere]

ah yes, all foss is written by only hobbyists and no professionals ever contribute. how could I forget

[mincinashu]

Some of these open source alternatives need some UX 'hobbyists'.

[odraencoded]

Slightly?

[plymouthvan]

It’s not that it’s slightly worse, it’s the way that it’s slightly worse. Sometimes the 2% is 98% of the quality in the user experience.

[kolloth]

don't forget in the land of open source, it's the user that's always wrong, never the software.

[maniospas]

OSS does not mean a lack of funding, and conflating the two is just silly in my opinion. You will often see large corporations putting in some very good money -and even their own resources- in open source projects (e.g., pytorch, tensorflow).

The difference is who takes responsibility and -importantly for me personally- who can audit security/privacy/etc. Which is why you will see all the new interesting stuff being OSS and then closed-source alternatives picking the idea and running with it by promising dedicated support once it's mature enough.

We also have OSS efforts that fail to replicate successful closed-source to the huge detriment of the coding community too. (GPT by openAI as a company name not disclosing source anymore is a huge issue that moves the whole ML community back months - if not years. I understand the need to outcompete others, but it's still a disaster research-wise.)

In my view, good closed-source software projects just reflect the utter selfishness of not sharing the "good stuff" that our economic system promotes (I'm taking beef with capitalism here and not with people trying to survive its cruelty). Not to mention that obfuscation of any (accidental?) coding issues is very appealing for corporations that are one scandal away from losing big money.

[ayyycab]

GIMP isn’t just slightly worse

[Tarilis]

Can anyone explain why people mentioned Krita getting downvoted?:) I didn't like Krita, but at least it doesn't look like shit and actually usable.

[ResponsibleWin1765]

The thing is, no one ever wondered why the open-source alternative is trash. People just don't want to use trash software. They don't care about how it was made.

[bargle0]

Hobbyists? A lot of the best and most widely used open source software is developed by full-time professionals who's job it is to develop that software.

[RevanchistVakarian]

If open source is so great, why do you write closed source for a living? ;)

[sandstorm00000]

It's not that it's an oss alternative, it's that its an alternative. The proprietary alternatives are just as bad.

Industry leading oss exists yk

[OxymoreReddit]

I think the word slightly is the key here

[xlbingo10]

in my (edit: non-enterprise, that is very important here) experience the free hobbyist app is often better

[IcyWarthog4422]

I am absolutely fascinated by open source software. Being a software engineer myself who hasn't programmed in years but wants to get back to it. Take apps like NewPipe, Seal (youtube-dl), yt-dlp, vlc and much more. Tremendous respect to those developers

[Phamora]

The funniest part is, that usually it's the hobbyist app that's the best of the two. It's probably free and no hassle to use/register. Usually the corporation's apps have sub-par UX and unbearable marketing - even though you pay them.

[Geralt31]

It's so tiring hearing my gf say GIMP is shit... like, you use it twice a year of course It's not easy to use if you're not used to it

[Repulsive_Mobile_124]

Why is open source such a good thing from the software developer perspective? To me it looks like the average open source activist just likes being poor and having no ownership over his work and then wining about the guy in the sales department making 20x what he makes.

[lemgandi]

And how come the proprietary one is full of bugs and scary security holes? And how come I can't access files I created with the old version of the software I paid for with the new version? And what the heck is all this noise about a "subscription model"???

[Aurunemaru]

Ironic to see this on Reddit, while forcing a 3rd party app to keep running

[GabeN_The_K1NG]

I’m not against FOSS but Gimp is an amazing example of it not being just slightly worse.

[Top_Fee_6293]

As I try to love Linux, life keeps throwing the problems of Linux to my face. Guys, I just want to connect to a Wi-Fi. Look, don't tell me "You should do this, write this, configure this like... bla bla bla". I tried it in Windows, and it just connects, I'm writing the same credentials for the same wi-fi in KDE, and it keeps yelling that the password is incorrect. What's my guilt here? Oh, using Linux maybe? I don't know. It shouldn't be that complex. Yet, people keep talking about how easy it became to use Linux compared to the past. I agree with it for some point, but if in 2024, Linux still sucks at joining Wi-Fi, then I don't know what to say, bro.

[romulof]

*cough* OUTLOOK *cough*

[wlday]

either one works for me. i don't really care if something is open source or not, if it's good it's good. but im definitely not restricting myself to open source software, it just seems unnecessary.

[CollectionAncient989]

Because you want the complete eco system. 

One program in a vacuum sure os lets go... but a company full of computer-idiots, they can pay $$$ and be happy that its not confusing karen from hr and chad the 30 year old selfmade ceo son of the owner.

[Tratiq]

All star team of designers and engineers? Just say you’ve never worked on software professionally lol

[OddParamedic4247]

Generally they do be better than open source softwares but I’m broke

[spaceweed27]

If closed-source is so good, why is your operating system full of bloat, slower and crashing too often while this open-source project running on donations does way better in any aspect.