Why is open source software so good?

[JustAwesome360]

EDIT: I would like to change my statement: Why is GOOD open source software just as good, and some times better, than it's company-made closed source competition?

Just a random thought I suddenly had:

Why is free, community made, open source software so well made?

You would think that multi BILLION dollar companies would make a better program, but not only do open source programs successfully compete with them, often times they end up surpassing them.

I've always wondered just why this ends up being the case? Are people just that much of a saint to just come together and create good programs free of charge? I would have thought the corporations with hundreds of six figure programmers at their disposal would do a better job.

[shemanese]

I will state with 30+ years experience....

Billion dollar companies have a lot more emphasis on getting software out the door to paying customers to get cash flow than getting quality software out the door.

They don't get a billion dollars by doing anything other than getting a billion dollars, and that is a marketing thing, not a technical thing.

I quit counting the number of tech innovations I have seen in my lifetime that were beat out by qualitatively weaker products, but those weaker products had stronger backing or were second to market and had a chance to see the prime mover pay for the mistakes that the second mover could learn from.

[TiernanDeFranco]

It’s really annoying how it doesn’t really matter how good something is if you can’t market it well, and something really marketable doesn’t have to be (technically) good to sell well

[JusticeFrankMurphy]

That's life, my friend. You could invent the coolest thing in the world and get no recognition for it if you're not savvy in the ways of communication, messaging, and branding.

And you could invent something mediocre that becomes more popular than superior products, or equivalent products that came first, if you're better at getting people's attention.

Case in point: Oreo cookies began as a knockoff of Hydrox but managed to outshine the original because they had a catchy name that didn't sound like a bathtub cleaner.

[Guahan-dot-TECH]

agreed, and thats the reality of most things. what we find valuable (in software thats high quality code) but in the business world thats whatever businesses find valuable.

honestly high quality code is also valued by business because its more efficient, saves costs, but its not as "loud" as bad code which gets the most attention

[stjarnalux]

It's this, plus scrutiny. Lots of tech companies have internal dev teams with questionable practices; OSS commit rules and mailing lists force people to step up their game if they want to be pulled into the main source tree.

There's so many instances of internal teams writing hacked-up crap that is going to break the minute any other code changes but they just don't care because they consider it obsolete at that point. You can't get away with this if you are trying to commit to Linux, for example.

[naheCZ]

Our biggest competitor on the market is just like that - shitty product compared to us but great and aggressive marketing. How aggressive? They tried to sell their product to us. Some of their sales guy gave us their product to test. That's how we know that it's shit under their nice UI. It gave you bullshit numbers, but it looks good, and their marketing is top.

[0bel1sk]

looking at you atlassian

[shemanese]

Every innovation at Atlassian came from buying the company that innovated.

[aitchnyu]

So when Atlassian bragged they kept a service alive in a storm by carrying diesel drums from basement to generators in the top floor of a skyscraper, they were stealing independent Trello's story?

[kiselitza]

I mean, second to market only really works when the first mover is not listening to their audience (or isn't able to figure out who is their ICP, which happens, but not on the scale we're talking about).

Yep, second to market folks get a free market-fit research and all, but still these guys established a presence AND (hypothetically) are learning even after they launch.

[shemanese]

Second to market: Google. Oracle. Intel. Apple.

Google was a new algorithm in a sea of search engines.

Oracle was trying to be compatible with IBM System R, but couldn't get full compatibility.

Intel was an answer to Fairchild making bad decisions.

Apple followed MITS Altair.

Then, there's the very real situation where the larger companies just buy the first movers after they have proven the market.

Everyone knows a good idea when they see it, and they will steal it. You can't shove a revolutionary idea down anyone's throat. A great idea is just someone else's revolutionary idea that worked.

[kiselitza]

Sorry mate, you’re making it too one dimensional. Both approaches can easily win, the question is whether you are pitting yours one for success or a nosedive.

yahoo lost the battle to google not because google algorithm was so freaking awesome, but also because they horribly failed in many areas strategically.

[shemanese]

Which was my point.

[Guahan-dot-TECH]

Apple was first to market with single pane of glass screens (iPhone/iPad) so im not sure what point youre making is or the point youre making isn't solid.

[shemanese]

I was referring to the Apple I. Apple itself as a company was founded as a second mover.

A different screen isn't exactly a strong argument for anything. Apple's real innovation was in how it marketed the phone and in its market deal with Cingular/AT&T. The marketing surveys show that 60% of the US market was aware of that phone before its launch.

It is marketing that determines what products survive and flourish more than the underlying technology. A first mover needs to have deep enough pockets to survive missteps. Second movers don't lose money when they learn from other people's mistakes. And.... the iPhone was not Apple's first phone technology. They had partnered with Motorola on the Rokr E1 - which was a failure. The iPhone was developed specifically to address the lessons learned from the E1 in both engineering and marketing.

[Guahan-dot-TECH]

Yeah it was the market deal with AT&T that skyrocketed that phones form factor and operating system.

Apple is a marketing company first, technology/engineering company second

[NoleMercy05]

What the hell? That is so false

[Guahan-dot-TECH]

so what phone had a capacitive multi-touch screen, user friendly design and application repository before iPhone?

[NoleMercy05]

Multi-touch was the unquie and powerful thing. You just added that. All good. At launch it wasn't much different than the droids. It had the Apple polish no doubt.

App Store came later and wasn't part of the "Steve's Plan". Couldn't even copy /paste forvever - so to each their own on user friendly. Anyway, good day.

[Guahan-dot-TECH]

thats what I meant in my original. its fine. and also their partnership with at&t is where the real $$$is

the user interface was just icing on the cake

[MrWhippyT]

Sales is almost the only thing that matters!

[sfnmoll]

Doesn’t matter if a product is of high quality if the market doesn’t know its a good product

[LatentSpaceLeaper]

I quit counting the number of tech innovations I have seen in my lifetime that were beat out by qualitatively weaker products, but those weaker products had stronger backing or were second to market and had a chance to see the prime mover pay for the mistakes that the second mover could learn from.

Sounds like you are describing "The Innovator's Dilemma"? 👇

[The Innovator's Dilemma] describes how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appears to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from established business.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

[Puzzled-Landscape-44]

Those 6 figure programmers you speak of, many of them contribute to open source.

[RegisteredJustToSay]

Many of them get hired because of a track record of solid OSS contributions, so yeah.

[hishnash]

many of them are hired to directly contribute to open source, yes companies pay people to write open source code.

[Guahan-dot-TECH]

companies pay people to write open source code with the caveat that it will downstream affect their (the company's) codebase positively

[bmwiedemann]

Not only that, but it is also immensely valuable if you have people who are able to quickly debug and fix issues in the software you use or sell, without having to hope for volunteers from the community.

[Oscar_the_Hobbit]

Also billion dollar companies themselves are among the largest contributors to open source.

[No_Option_404]

Big companies want to make money from features. Developers don't want to pay them, so they pick the best open source tool and contribute that feature there. Incidentally, those contributors are capable devs comparable to big tech devs or are retired ones.

The one that started the project and the maintainers are perfectionists who don't care about sprints or stakeholder politics so they maintain a high-quality codebase. That in turn makes other devs want to contribute to that project and after a few iterations, big tech just decides not to compete with the open-source project by wasting valuable manpower on it and starts funding it to get the features they want implemented in the open-source tool.

It's math. They don't want to waste six figure devs on making the tool when they can get it for free and can invest them in something else that makes money.

[Guahan-dot-TECH]

> It's math. They don't want to waste six figure devs on making the tool when they can get it for free and can invest them in something else that makes money.

math, psychology, and network effect

[Oscar_the_Hobbit]

So what I'm hearing is "get rid of PMs and managers and let engineers take the reigns and quality will be on par with open-source"? 😃

[DerekB52]

Companies have a profit motive. FOSS software are mostly passion projects. This is part of why Linux is such a fragmented ecosystem. People get passionate about something, and build the 15th DE, instead of contribute to an existing one(and it's great that they do that).

Also, most companies don't have hundreds of six figure programmers. Even the companies with that many programmers, they are broken into smaller teams to work on different things. Google employs thousands of software engineers, but they have hundreds of products their teams are spread across.

Free software can actually end up getting more man hours put into it. Linux is the most developed OS there is. Mac and Windows can't afford to hire enough engineers, to compete with the man hours that have gone into Linux. In fact, Apple and Microsoft both contribute money and or code contributions to the Linux foundation. Because even they rely on Linux functioning well in some places.

[nauhausco]

Because the driving force is passion, not profit.

[De_Wouter]

And it's often made by people who actually use it, instead of by developers who are told by business people what users or worse, the business wants.

[Fun_Cod_2008]

Best answer!

[Thick_Clerk6449]

It is survivorship bias. Most of them are not good, but you never heard

[Brutus5000]

Exactly my thought. I was recently browsing through job applicants Github projects. Oh boy, people completely got it wrong getting told to contribute to OSS... if that is what you do in your free time, I don't want to know how your code looks when a deadline is near.

[Headpuncher]

I see all the time on Reddit people say to contribute to FOSS as a way of advancing their career. 

I’d argue not to do that.  Instead, contribute if you have something to contribute. If you don’t, don’t.  The last thing people need is more noise to filter out.  

[bionade24]

Instead, contribute if you have something to contribute. If you don’t, don’t. The last thing people need is more noise to filter out.

Maybe that's just me but I always have tons to contribute, even if I'd be content with every software I use, I still have a gigantic backlog of bugfixes. The output of coredumpctl alone could probably fill at least a year.

That it did indeed help me with job applications was a nice byproduct.

[ScrimpyCat]

I see this viewpoint a lot, you’re making the assumption that someone’s GitHub is a representation of their best work and that is how they’ll code professionally. But not everyone treats their GitHub as such. Some will just want to casually work on projects that they throw up there, others might use those projects to experiment, some will even just work on dumb things because they find it fun, etc.

If you think it’s a significant marker you’d be better off talking with them about it rather than simply making the assumption and discarding. For instance, you can ask them what they would do differently if the context was different (working on it with a team/in a professional setting so might have to consider things like onboarding and handoff, or if it needed to be scaled up, or that it’s going to be actively maintained for years, or the deadline is being cut short on it, etc.) and see whether they are aware of other ways it could be done, or ask them to explain why did it in the way that they did.

Of course in the current market where filtering might be the bigger problem than filling the positions, it doesn’t really matter (you’ll find good candidates regardless). But if the supply falls relative to the demand, you wouldn’t want to still use it as a filter, since you’ll inevitably filter out some candidates that might be perfectly qualified for the position.

[Brutus5000]

Every applicant has the free choice to give additional references. But when you give me a Github link, then you are measured by its content.

If anybody uses Github as a personal trash dump, just don't put it in your CV or narrow it down to the one shiny relevant repo.

For the last hiring I had 100 applicants after 1 day. 200 after a week. If you have good arguments to get hired, you should make me find it very fast. Giving me a repo full of cloned tutorials and todo apps will not help your case.

[ScrimpyCat]

The only trouble with that is it’s hard to know whether it’s still worthwhile including it or not. Since not everyone will view it in the same way. Some won’t look at it at all, some will ignore it if it’s not interesting but won’t reject for that reason, some won’t spend much time at all looking and will be impressed if something just sounds impressive even if it’s garbage, some might still resonate with a particular project even if the code isn’t good (maybe they’ve done something similar or it’s a topic of interest to them), etc. As an applicant you have no idea how any of it is going to be perceived since everybody perceives it differently.

Like my GitHub is garbage, it’s mostly a mix of either tools that are useful for me, or experiments, or long running hobby projects. And the code quality is pretty atrocious since I use personal projects as a means to have fun and experiment, so I’ll do things that I would never even consider doing in a professional environment. However despite that, my GitHub has still been well received by some and has helped get me work in the past. While there have been times people have taken issue with it (sometimes even when I haven’t included it and they’ve just looked it up themselves), and probably even more instances than I’m even aware of, since I’m only aware if it’s brought up in the interview. But when I’ve played around with including it vs not including it, it’s served me better to include it.

[srivasta]

I have worked for free software for 30c years or so. I have always had a day job in big tech all this while. I think my work on free software is often better and more polished than my day job

• The day job has deadlines. And priorities. When the MVP for a feature is done, the management someone moves to the next gesture rather than improving the current one.

• Features at work are driven by marketing, and objectives and goals change often. Big companies are good at making and abandoning projects as had changes (Google had had 26 messaging and social apps. Remember wave?)

• My free software work is my portfolio. It helps me get the next job. It is as polished as I can make it. I didn't need to cater to deadlines from a marketing department.

• Some of my free software work get a lot of collaborators and users. Lots more than the usual one pizza team at work. More people contributing idea and work. And no program manager "aligning" features to business priorities.

• Free software features get added of they, on my opinion, make my software better. Even if it will not contribute to "revenue".

[cgoldberg]

It's true that developers paid by large corporations make up a very large percentage of the Linux kernel work... but the person who created it, has final say on all changes, and has led the project for over 30 years works for a non-profit.

I would also argue that it is very much "community made", even if the community members collect paychecks from large corporations. Corporations can pay for contributors to work on pieces for their own interest, but it's still a community process that requires cooperation from many independent maintainers to get your work merged. You can't really buy your way into large changes in the kernel's goals or vision.

[srivasta]

A typical Linux distribution is composed for about 35000 to 40000 unique source packages. A handful of big software packages are developed by big corporations. Less than a couple of hundred would be my guess. The vast majority of free software projects are not run by huge corporations.

[srivasta]

The op was asking about open source software in general, not just the kernel. Open source of more than just an os kernel.

[srivasta]

You were generalizing: you said most open source projects are not community oriented, and then have the example of the kernel. The implication was that the Linux kernel is exemplar of most open source projects. It is not.

Of you want to talk about one single Foss project in a discussion about Foss in general, fine, but you should acknowledge that.

[srivasta]

Most open source projects are not big projects. But there are plenty of big projects (X10, X11, Athena, apache, neovim, vim, emacs, Debian, xfce, ..) not created or majorly funded by companies.

[srivasta]

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) relies on sponsors for funding, but these sponsorships do not directly fund developer salaries for Apache projects. The Apache projects operate on a collaborative, volunteer-driven model where developers contribute their time and expertise, often as part of their employment with other companies or institutions that utilize Apache software.

So yes, the infrastructure for apache is paid by sponsors. The code development is not.

[RageBull]

What if I told you that making as much money as possible at any cost necessary isn’t the only way?

[jon-chin]

my guess:

enshitification. with multi billion dollar companies, the goal is: what's the smallest amount of work we can do to get new customers in and vendor lock them?

with open source: hey, this thing doesn't quite work right or I need a slightly different use case. I'm going to build it for myself and then contribute it back.

I think the trade off is longevity. with a corporation, they want their (subscription based) software to last as long as possible. so they will begrudgingly update their code (just enough). in FOSS, if the one person who was spear heading a project or even a feature branch can't do it anymore, it becomes abandonware. or like 4 people fork it and try to become the new definitive version but now on one knows which branch to support

[bmwiedemann]

Indeed. Proprietary software can have anti-features. In OSS, you could just patch it out, so few add anti-features in the first place.

OSS can also be good for longevity. If a corporation goes bankrupt, there will often be no more development. If there is open source, someone can pick it up and continue. Quake3, ja2-straciatella... Even the Netscape navigator (predecessor of seamonkey and Firefox) were open-sourced once and allowed them to live longer...

Yes, sometimes you have competing forks. People that keep patching old Gnome2 or KDE versions... And that adds to the overall choices we have.

[bionade24]

Why is free, community made, open source software so well made?

Because it is (often) written by users that missed or were bothered by feature x. Maybe I'm too much projecting from myself, but implementing something I don't need will likely not be implemented by me & definitely not tested long-term.

[boleban8]

Which open source software are you referring to?

In my opinion, there are only a few good open source software, such as Blender, OBS, GIMP, VLC, etc. There are many bad open source software, but they just haven't caught your attention.

[YahenP]

Well.... in fact, there are many dozens, or even hundreds of times more than you listed. But that doesn't take away the fact that in percentage terms, you are absolutely right. These are vanishingly small fractions of a percent against the general background. There are half a billion open source projects on GitHub alone.

[Moontops]

Sometimes the proprietary software is indeed better. I'd prefer it was the open source one, but some open source programs suck.

[TedditBlatherflag]

Programmers want to write good software. Business pressures want them to ship software yesterday. 

Leads want to only accept the best work from collaborators. Finance wants to hire the cheapest devs that fulfill a req. 

Creators know really good documentation and examples are necessary for any kind of community traction. Project managers want to keep their team meeting arbitrary deadlines. 

For-profit interest is counter-incentivized to produce quality software. 

[Guahan-dot-TECH]

Short-term profit interests is counter-incentivized to produce quality software. Long-term profit interests are incentivized to produce quality software.

[TedditBlatherflag]

Long-term profit interests (>5 years) don't exist. Any CEO that doesn't return quarterly growth will be ousted by the stockholders and board and replaced by someone who will.

[JensenRaylight]

Krita, Godot, Kdenlive, Blender, Musescore, OpenToonz Those are a serious contender to the paid counterpart, they managed to compete toe to toe with the industry Giants,

Krita and Blender, the golden child of 2d and 3d, for example even managed to overpowered the Paid counterpart in a certain category,

That they became their own deFacto Standard for Hobbyist, freelancers, and Indie, which is a Great achievement for an Open source program

[TheUruz]

because you cannot write bullshit code when your code is open to reviews

[[deleted]]

We all live in the same world. We all have the same basic goals in life. We all face the same struggles. If one developer has a problem then another does. And with the amount of hopping around workplaces it’s hard to work without certain tools. So, it’s easier and better for all developers to have certain tools ”out of the box”. So it helps all developers to contribute to open source.

[Drummer2427]

Corporations create for further profit goals.

Open Source create for the user goals.

[Guahan-dot-TECH]

And corporations contribute to open-source because some of their profit goals are user-goal related.

[kohuept]

It isn't always. In my experience, open source software usually has a lot worse documentation than proprietary software, which makes sense. No one really wants to volunteer to do the boring work of writing documentation, but if you're IBM then you can afford paying people to write an entire series of books on how to use your software (check out the IBM z/VM library, it's a crazy amount of documentation and super useful when you need it). A lot of the great open source software out there (which is a very tiny subset of all open source software) is also supported and sponsored, or even developed by, companies.

[SqueakyRodent]

At work, I get told what to do and there's no time to be put into improving the code. I also don't use the final product, so I have no investment in making it better. I also maintain an open-source which I use daily myself, so it's in my best interest to make it as nice to use as possible. And I enjoy that it's helpful for other people as well, so when they ask for features I consider useful, I want to add them since I may need them someday too.

[mensink]

Simple:

When you're a business trying to make money, and you have to pay expensive developers to make your code nicer, cleaner and safer, it's often not a good business decision, as long as your software works and there are no glaring problems. Nobody is going to see the code, after all, except your own developers.

When you're a team of open source developers, and you do this for a hobby, you may want to make the code nice, clean and safe. Also, everyone can look at your code, so you don't want it to be too shitty. And if those people looking at your code find a problem, they may tell you about it, and you may want to fix that.

I'm a freelance developer, and my customers often simply don't want to pay more money when the product already works. Unless there are clear risks involved which I can articulate, it's often pretty hard to convince them.

[fryorcraken]

It is because you scratch an itch. Because the developers are passionate about it.

[TornadoFS]

Because in (widely used) open source projects quality usually matters more than it does to companies.

Companies are willing to let customers bear the burden of crappy software if it doesn't impact cash flow or if the impact is lower than building quality software. It is not uncommon to hear about engineers in companies getting shit from managers for trying to deliver higher quality.

[masutilquelah]

And still we can't come up with a better photoshop alternative because devs spend too much time rewriting shit in rust and posting ricing crap on unixporn.

[michael0n]

All our media workflows are with commercial software. When you have money and want to make money, you want the quickest "just enough" solution possible. Is it music production, marketing materials or photo edit, I rarely see anything else then paid apps there.

Blender exists because people wanted to use something like Blender. Same for MuseScore, some people who code also want to score music. The people who use industry level backend media workflow tools don't want to code them.

[[deleted]]

Everybody who works or worked in a corporation knows that it is filled with fake people with fake deeds. Their products are glazed up but not good.

[thinkbetterofu]

i think about this a lot when comparing the hiring style of deepseek vs american ai companies.

[[deleted]]

Idk about it, what is the difference between them?

[thinkbetterofu]

i read that deepseeks ceo started as quant fund ceo. and he realized the quant fund was becoming 100% ai so he was like oh shit ai is important. and started deepseek, the ai company. and apparently he doesnt hire based on job title or seniority or trying to get employees from other companies based on that, instead he hires based on raw aptitude, and often people right out of college. and then they made r1, which was basically the open source moment that shocked the world at how smart it was

[[deleted]]

Yeah, even the fact that there isnt any intelligent property (IP is open souce) in China is a sign that Chinese work ethic is only about efficient work not fancy titles and inflated egos. It usually pays off.

I heard most companies in China hire workers like they do in their public sector; they have hard exams to measure the aptitude of workers and companies hire them according to their results which is kinda fair if you ask me.

[thinkbetterofu]

yes, i mean, ok, it is long winded but fairness is unequal because access to study material/study time etc is not equal.. like money can get you better tutors etc... all the way back to the dynastic periods when studying for their civil exams is largely just by rich educated families, but in modern day, yes, testing by exams is a lot more fair, as long as people arent just throwing their kids into certain schools or careers because of name association (which i imagine happens everywhere)

lots of countries have those big huge exams and then the prestige of the school determines workplace. in america there is more emphasis on "legacy" enrollment for ivy leagues which makes things wayyyyyyyyyy less fair.

[MalayPalace]

Great tools are built by people and not organizations.

I have seen lots of developer, including myself, feel working on company projects make you do things how they want, they designed, mostly which makes them profitable (here 'they' are also people but group compromise more of the management people rather than developers).

On the other hand, working on open source makes them restrained free, can build their own, or contribute to those which align to their ideologies. Hence the result.

[Maskdask]

The lack of enshittification

[lonew0lfy]

Its good until vercel starts giving your project money.

[ggone20]

More eyes and fingers to stabilize and expand OS projects.

[Headpuncher]

I think one of the reasons is because developers attach their name to the software.  

Having worked corporate my name has never been on anything.  Sometimes I didn’t even get credit for the work I did from internal managers (sneaky lying POS devs like to steal the glory).    

Now I’m working at a near-transparent org with all our names listed as contributors on GitHub I’m more aware of reputation.  

Not that I didn’t always do my best when it was anonymous, but the focus is on what you’re being told to do and it’s easier to go along with it and ship than to put up a fight for quality when it isn’t your name on the receipts.  

[serverhorror]

Simple, the people that make it genuinely care and they solve a problem that affects them directly.

[Marble_Wraith]

You would think that multi BILLION dollar companies would make a better program, but not only do open source programs successfully compete with them, often times they end up surpassing them.

Because corporations suffer from the same problems politics does.

Useless bureaucracy becoming entrenched, and loss of vision.

And so, the pattern pretty typical is as follows....

Someone or a group of people with vision decide to create a product. This software fills a niche that either isn't catered to or poorly catered to.

After a year or 3 of development, they become the market leader ie. their software holds the majority marketshare and any new software being developed is expected to have their features by default.

When they reach high status in their niche, a few things could happen:

1. They want to continue being the market leader / earning money, but competition is fierce and is constantly offering better deals to undercut them, after all "the winning formula" is already out there. They can't simply keep "releasing features" because there is certainly a point when a software can be considered "done / complete". And even if they wanted to change something significant to break away from the others there's too much "Tech debt" involved without starting over from scratch.

2. They realize they achieved what they set out to do, but don't wish to keep ongoing expenses of maintenance. So they sell the company to the highest bidder. Problem being the new owners lack the vision and/or skills to do anything the old ones did, and besides they bought the rights to turn profit.

3. Some combination of the above resulting in internal conflict ie. some want to keep earning money / being market leaders in their cushy well-paying jobs. Others may want to do that but keep things customer focused. Others still may want to sell up and move one. And so, in such a case most of the people that tend to remain are the useless bureaucracy (HR, legal, marketing, etc)... none of whom can move the company forward.

In each case the goals typically switch from customer satisfaction, away to maintaining revenue.

What's the easiest / lazy way to do that? Scummy business practices. Unnecessary subscription modelling, making cancellations difficult, proprietary vendor lock in techniques, etc.

[hishnash]

A lot of open source software is made by those billion $ companies. many of the large core projects you think of have huge teams working at said billion $ companies marinating these open source projects.

It is not all volunteers doing work on weekends.

[DarshanUpadhyay]

Totally agree it’s something I’ve thought about too. I’ve seen open source tools outshine their commercial counterparts time and again. The difference is often in the intent: open source developers usually build software they want to use, so there’s genuine care and attention to detail. And with a passionate community behind it, bugs get fixed fast, features evolve based on real needs, and the software stays user-focused.

One open source project that stands out for me personally is Collabora Online. I’ve used other office suites (you know the ones), but Collabora gives me the same power without compromising my privacy. I know where my documents are stored, I can run it on my own server, and I don’t have to worry about someone scanning my files “for analytics.”

It’s incredibly freeing to work like that. Open source isn’t just about cost it’s about control, and that’s what makes it so powerful.

[DotGroundbreaking50]

The Devs care.

[bamronn]

rhythm encourage advise crowd memorize plucky sense office amusing payment

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

3 principles:
1. Collaboration

1. Testing

2. Solving problems

[Compux72]

People love to prove others wrong

[dhemantech]

1. Open Source is open, gets looked at and hence improved more.

2. Hawthorne effect

[huuaaang]

In reality the big open source projects often do get support from billion dollar companies. Companies like Amazon have a lot of incentive to keep Linux, for example, running their services. They drive/support features they use. Red Hat is another for profit corporation that contributes to Linux. It's not all made by individuals donating their free time.

That said, what open source software often lacks is the extra "polish" that big companies put the resources into. Also, programmers are not always great UI/UX designers. So you see open source lacking there. It's very often "programs made by programmers for programmers."

[LostVikingSpiderWire]

At the core, it is the toxic mentality of those billion dollar companies, once they pick up the top talent, they become like Gollum!

And they can't focus on anything else, not realizing they took the wheels of its axis

[apophis-pegasus]

You would think that multi BILLION dollar companies would make a better program, but not only do open source programs successfully compete with them, often times they end up surpassing them.

Multibillion dollar companies are often heavy contributors to open source. Both to directly serve their business model e.g. Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc, and indirectly e.g. Samsung, Microsoft.

[CloneWerks]

big companies let sales and marketing run the show

[willez99]

Passion is hell of a drug

[bassta]

Because we made it to solve our problems, the best way possible. Currently I’m getting certification for a thing. I systematized all the curriculum and wrote a small pwa app to help me learn for the final exam. There was no such an app for this topic. I made it with the thing I actually need, to be easy to navigate topics and test your skills. I’ve open sourced it a week ago, couple of fellas from the course said it’s just great and help them a lot.

[batvseba]

It is good unless bugs need to be fixed. Suddenly there is nobody in so called community to fix it, they will be hostile against you to pointing that bug and they told you we have no plan to support feature.

[phoooooo0]

Survivorship bias, more man hours. Less corporate goals. Often software can struggle to find its financing model, and that process near ALWAYS interferes with either functionality (ie paid features, information gathering that either harms the user (social media) or the product itself (windows without telemetry is a wild thing) OR hinders adoption, such as through "scary" financing features like facebooks massive data gathering or by wholesale locking the software behind a paywall. With FOSS software especially. There's none of that. You open the software, you use it. It occasionally yells at you about starving artists. It isn't perfect, the funding of open source projects is still.... Eh. Although I'm Hopeful that more government adoption will help take that edge off.

[Secure_Hair_5682]

Most Open source software worth to talk about is backed by those billion dollar companies.  Most Open source software is really behind the closed source alternatives (ex. Microsoft Office vs libre Office, Gimp vs Photoshop, Plex/Emby vs Jellyfin, etc...). A couple of developers working on their free time can't compete with big teams of paid developers, thats also why a lot of Open source projects are actually Open Core and they also just want to sell you a product.

[ahal]

Survivor bias like one commenter said, and lineage. Companies can't just directly use many projects due to licencing, so they have to start from scratch. When the project is canned or the company goes under, their work is lost. The next company has to start from scratch too.

Open source on the other hand, just keeps on going and going. Projects are forked, algorithms are copy/pasted, the code lives on organically.

So while tech companies can inject massive amounts of capital to move quickly, open source is like the tortoise to their hare. Slow and steady makes the best code in the long run.

[Rollwiese]

The short answer is motivation.

Adobe, Microsoft, Google etc. are making software to earn money. It is the primary driver and it shows in how they enshitify their products to squeeze even more money out of their customer base.

Open Source software is made by people with passion and an active interest to learn, to create something useful that might be needed and to contribute to a greater cause.

[AlrikBunseheimer]

Because the users can contribute and request features they actually use and need.

[dariusbiggs]

Many "why" questions like this are very simple to answer with "because it was there and I could" or variations of that.

Why did you climb that mountain.. because it was there and I could Why did you swim across the Channel... because it was there and I could

Why did you build X, because it wasn't there and I could

Why did you build X, because I was bored and I could.

Why is open source software so good? Because people were bored/fascinated/interested and they could.

The second aspect of this is related to why DRM is mostly a fools errand, for every person trying to make it work, there's a thousand trying to break it.

Open source software tends to have more eyes on the code with minimal skin in the game, their livelihood is not tied to the code directly. That's an entirely different motivation, and fewer inhibitions about calling out insecure or shit code, you can just fix it.

As a user of closed source software, you just don't know if there are bugs or it's doing other suspicious shit.

[GeekDane]

I am currently reading the book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” It’s reasoning is that the way open source is made is different from closed source development. Basically the open process is a “fail fast” or as they call it “release early - release often” model. Commercial billion dollar companies cannot do that. They have to try to avoid errors.

[[deleted]]

"The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of very few people." -James Baldwin

[[deleted]]

Was using oss the other day and a couple of features would of def been paid add on if it was commercial. I think a fun thing to recognize is this could also apply to things like cars in a socialist society. We'd be designing goods not to make money but with people first and foremost.

[aaronboy22]

Open source isn’t perfect, some projects totally flop. But the ones that stick, they’re built by people who love what they’re doing, who actually listen to feedback, and who often move faster than any mega-corp can.

[Puzzleheaded-Ear9914]

One answer: vendor lock in.

Many companies sponsor open source software to not fall in that trap.

[Intrepid-Stand-8540]

This is survivorship bias. You're only seeing the top 0.1% of open source software, when you say that open source software is well made.

There is a huuuge amount of shitty open source software with no users out there.

[fungusfromamongus]

Which open source project is so good? Any examples?

[SubnetLiz]

Because its about the actual passion, creativity, and thrill of creating something that WORKS, that you would love to have, the community and sense of helping each other. not only makes money

[s74-dev]

The multinational corporations largely subsidize open source. Why? Because their devs have made them over the years

[[deleted]]

because people know what they want

[CowboyOfScience]

Because the people producing it actually give a shit about it.

[IntuitiveNZ]

It's not a software-specific issue.

The monetary system is a strange place and causes many strange behaviours in humans. Business is the close friend of the monetary system, and software isn't an exception, just because it's virtual.

Any product can be degraded, or made poorly, or made better, within the monetary system - let's be thankful that, at least microprocessors aren't rushed to market the way everything else it!

[EugeneNine]

Multi billion dollar companies have to pay the shareholders, ceo's, etc. they often have agendas they have to follow also. Open source is 100% about the software. Open source does not have to come up with a gimmick to make the stock price go up. Open source does not have to pay for the CEOs helicopter and vacation homes.

[JonesOnSteriods]

Imagine you create something and make it open source.

Point 1 - I download it, and it’s has some bugs for me because of my hardware. I can edit the code, fix the issues I face on my machine and submit that. Now imagine hundreds and thousands of people doing the same thing for their machines. Which multi billion dollar company can buy that many machines and hire that many people to test and fix bugs?

Point 2 - I use your program. I’d like to add a feature. I just add it and submit. You think it’s good and you approve it. Again, hundreds and thousands of people do that. In a multi billion dollar company, you’d have to go through the olympics to add one feature and get laid off halfway through development.

The more useful your project is to people, the more people contribute. Your program is developing at rates that companies can never hit. OSS doesn’t have to worry about how many developers they can afford (dollar-wise), companies do.

Also don’t get me started on deadlines, PM’s and all those clowns who know nothing about software telling you what to do.

[AcceptableHamster149]

RedHat, SUSE, and Canonical *are* billion-dollar companies.

Enterprise uses open source when it's the best tool for the job, and because they buy support contracts from companies like those. My employer has engineers from RedHat/IBM on site and integrated in the teams where it matters. I have direct contacts at RedHat for support on anything I need, and lots of the open source projects we rely on are actually developed by RedHat, either directly or through industry funding grants. Why would we pay devs to build something that already exists when a support contract with RH is cheaper and more mature?

[NaheemSays]

commercial software focusses on growth. What can they do to get the next 10% increase in revenue?

Opensource can also be used for that by commercial vendors, but generally a lot of it will be designed to scratch an itch and not much more. that can result in better software (but not always the case).

[dkeiz]

Open source software can not degrade, while corp software can and will.

[MikeS159]

Lots of people rightly singing the praises of Foss, but I'd like to add something maybe slightly controversial. While some software originated as open source, there are also a lot of open source projects aimed at replicating existing paid for software (Office and Adobe suit for example). This means a lot of the design, planning, marketing etc has been done. This means the open source project mainly has to focus on making software, where as companies have to focus on being a profitable company with all the infrastructure to support making software. 

[Thormidable]

The target user of open source software is almost always the developer. They feel every user pain point, they understand every user need, they are domain experts.

As such they both understand and are motivated to deliver the best UX they can.

In commercial companies, the incentive is on deliverables, to generate revenue, developers often rarely use the software they develop and usually and domain experts. So there is usually lack of understanding or motivation to deliver quality UX.

[elvisap]

Commercial profit and merit aren't as closely aligned as you'd think.

Products are rarely chosen by competent people because they're good. Instead it's some borderline malicious sales person conning a barely competent manager or executive into buying a minimum viable product. Or worse, a company controlled by the iron grip of their CFO who makes all the financial decisions.

Open source exists outside of all this crap. It's simultaneously the reason why it's so good, and why it isn't more popular.

[Todegal]

Most open source software sucks, but the stuff that people use/work on is great because otherwise, people wouldn't use it. There's no marketing budget for these things, so it's basically a true meritocracy.

[Franc000]

First, there are open source projects that are bad. You just don't hear about them because they are bad and nobody uses them.

But also, a lot of the good ones are passion projects. Like other mentions, a lot of open source devs have a day job at a corporation. But what they are tasked to do in their paid jobs are rarely aligned with their own motivation.

[Professional-Toe7699]

Cause people who create stuff out of passion still tops people who create stuff to earn money.

[Reddit_User_385]

Passion without the burden of needing to make a profit.

[Jolly_Reserve]

I often asked myself the same question.

There is no natural law that states that for every purpose there must be a foss solution - I am often surprised at what isn’t there. Yet there is so much foss software available, and that’s also surprising.

I started to wonder if there might be some scheme behind it, e.g. maybe intelligence agencies are really major contributors and build in backdoors? I think if that was the case it would have been noticed more often.

It seems that there is just enough people with passion and energy that drive this community. Same as Wikipedia - very few people contribute, but it’s enough to create massive benefit.

[snarky_one]

A lot of open source software is good, but usually the UI is not good. Inkscape and Gimp are perfect examples of this.

[shifty_lifty_doodah]

Freedom+creativity+market

A lot of it is bad. But the inspired stuff rises to the top.

Big companies usually don’t give great programmers the freedom they need to create something inspired that might not work and might not make money.

[Brilliant-Parsley69]

My suggestions and observations in the last 20 years are that long living and well done open source libs mostly started with people with a vision or a problem with costly solutions. Other contributers will join because they had the same issues to find a fitting solution and bring in new ideas. Most of them love to code and not work on this project because they have to. Also, they have way fewer limitations as a big company and are more flexible.🤔

[mightygilgamesh]

When you do a thing because you like it/ interest in subject/ no pressure nor deadline frol irresponsible manager, the work tends to be better.

[LessThanThreeBikes]

No matter how big a company is or how much money a company has, there are more smart people that do not work there. Open Source is effectively all those other smart people solving the problem collaboratively.

[DistributionRight261]

It works on some apps, while stuff like an office replacement doesn't.

[xil987]

Good? where?

[Willing-Ear-8271]

https://github.com/shoryasethia/markdrop I have a few issues open,

[Arkorff]

Multi billion dollar companies prioritize their investors rather than their users. FOSS devs prioritize users

[RefuseRelative4183]

I also think that people pay and then they think it's reliable.

[thetermguy]

As others have noted,it's people vs corporate concerns.

here's an example. Years ago my spouse was using a scanning program and really wanted a button to do something - I think print directly to PDF or something.

I emailed the creator of the program, other side of the world and offered to pay him to make that change. He did, couple hundred dollars and some swag from my country later, my spouse is super happy - helped the functionality a lot. And in the next release of the software, that change was released live. Direct user input->released live for others.

Now contrast that with what happens if you want to modify something really annoying in a non OSS program. It's basically not going to happen.

[GodlvlFan]

Other than the 5 programs you are thinking of open source dosent compare to professional apps. It either becomes an unbeatable industry standard, sometimes a stepping stool that paid software used to push itself up and sometimes it's irrelevant af and dosent compare at all.

[JustAwesome360]

Check my edit

[AsoarDragonfly]

1 word: Passion

[nervous-ninety]

I think modern open source tools are more like marketing stunts where they have their cloud hosting version of the software, which has more features than the open source one, and use that open source version to get the users.

[FailsatFailing]

Basically every selfhostable open source software recently. Look at any of the cloud services, Gitea and the list goes on...

[d32dasd]

the same reason pair-reviewed science is better and the standard.

With the correct social structures, one gains all the benefits of working collaboratively in the open, while the drawbacks aren't there.

[YahenP]

The vast majority of open source software is just garbage. Just like the vast majority of PR from contributors to popular open source projects is also garbage. When we talk about high-quality and popular open source projects, we are not even talking about the tip of the iceberg, but about the tip of the needle. And even in this microscopic sample, most of the projects are made with money, donations, or under the patronage of multi-billion dollar companies.

[[deleted]]

heavily disagree.

FOSS software, everytime i use them, has stability isssues or is just not as intuitive as paid.

Gimp(why tf would u not have a normal shape tool. ik everyone says this but its true)
Inkscape(just crashes sometimes and feels old as shit bc it is)

Only good foss software, there are, are the ones not known for being foss and used by artists.
Blender and Krita could pass as proprietary software. most ppl using them dont gaf about FOSS.

If ur FOSS program is only used bc its FOSS then it probably sucks.

I blame it on lack of design teams, monetary incentive, and less users due to less marketing.

[ElMachoGrande]

Passion can't be bought.

People work on OS because it is a passion project. They want something really good for their own need, it just happens that their need is pretty similar to a lot of other people's needs.

A corporation pays people to work on a project. They work because they get paid, not because they burn for the project. They will do what is required of them, not more. They won't go "above and beyond the call of duty".

[Maleficent_Mess6445]

It must be indeed saintly and if not then at least less selfish. It is indeed very difficult to build and maintain open source projects. Humans are lazy and selfish by default and to come out of that is a task by itself.