Yeah FOSS is a wonderful idea in theory. But any sustainable FOSS project has a big tech backer not far behind. Linux relies on the web a ton to fill in the app gaps. Which harms its selling point as a “private” OS.
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Well, I’ve reported about 50+ bugs and feature requests to LibreOffice. Some of them were really critical and I’ve always described them in a very clear and reproducable way, so I can say I did some work for the open source world.
My contibuting to LibreOffice project returns the discussion here to the problem of the open source world. What I have seen in the LibreOffice bug tracker is carelessness. Something like this: A random guy (me) issues a feature request. Then a message appears that the feature will be implemented in the next release. Without any discussion between developers whether it really should be implemented or not, or how exactly it should work and how exactly it should look. And the next release I see the feature is there but it works somewhat different from what I asked for. And then I open the bug tracker, post something like “What the heck?” there, and then two other developers appear there (not the guy who have implemented this feature) and reply me that I was correct and the issue is implemented the wrong way. And so and so and so on.
It’s like adopting a cat from the street but don’t feed or heal her if she ill. A life appoach that I don’t understand. Either adopt and care, or not adopt. Either do your work well or don’t do it at all.
The platonic ideal of people doing work for the sake of doing good work tends to fall flat. Capitalism has its problems for sure but people are motivated by profit to put out good work. Its why Apple gimps Safari on iOS to redirect people to the App store. That 30% is gravy and well developers do good work chasing that 70%.
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Surely the fact that GIMP exists means there is a pretty big disincentive to develop any alternative open source image editor? If I wanted to develop something that is hard to monetise, for editing images, why wouldn’t I just fork or contribute to GIMP?
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Well maybe so. But given the way you treat the volunteers on Ask Different who try to help you I’ll take your claims with a grain of salt.
Cheers.
The people you talk about are just 2 Ask Different moderators. If using a word “volunteers” it looks like you talk about Ask Different users in general, about the large number of people.
Those two guys are morons, and that’s my opinion. Yes.
Sure, I do agree that money is a good reason for doing a really good app. What I mean is that I don’t understand why people invest their time and efforts in something they don’t have intent to make really good. When I clean a flat, I do it to 90%, not to 60%. Because if I do it to 60%, I will not gain pleasure of doing the work well.
No. Not just the moderators. I know from direct experience.
Cheers.
Sorry, this is not true. The only time I behaved there “bad” (note the quotation marks!) to someone except those two mods was when a new-registerd-1-score guy posted a completely irrelevant answer and I simply wrote a comment to him “Sorry, this answer is completely irrelevant”. I didn’t even downvote him. Maybe it was a bit rude, but really only a bit.
This is an important thing to note that his answer was really useless and out of scope of the question and simply two lines of plain text. It seems he didn’t even try to read the question from the beginning to end. And if I remember correctly (but really, I might be wrong here, I don’t remember for sure), he didn’t even try to use capital letters.
Spam-like answers are harmful. If the question appears in the tracker as having an answer, it will be skipped by other users more likely. I tried to tell him to delete it, and given the facts in the second paragraph, I did it more-or-less politely.
And I wouldn’t even fork in that case. If you fork it, you become responsible for a gigantic project. 
I would wager that if you wanted to put in the time to seriously develop your own app, and were willing to donate that time to GIMP, that you would be one of the most influential people on the project in very short order.
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When you are talking about a large open source project, the odds are good that you are dealing with people that speak different primary languages, as well as all of the other less-exotic human communication challenges.
I have run into the “this feature was not implemented as expected” problem on my own projects, with all speakers natively speaking the same language, and having the ability to have ongoing, real-time communication.
I can’t imagine the insanity that would ensue if we were trying to coordinate dozens of people around the world and explain challenges across language gaps, especially for people that are doing this in their spare time.
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One of the difficult things about the internet is that it operates at enormous scale economically. It is really really good at disrupting analog industry, but does a poor job at being a viable and profitable alternative. To be a profitable digital company you have to have 10 times the scale than their analog predecessors. It is why these big tech companies are so huge and have such a monopolizing effect. They are the only ones that can survive a brutal competitive climate. Small projects are always going to have a much more difficult time if there isn’t a clear path forward towards sustainability.
I would say it much worse. I hightly recommend “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr. And then Marshall McLuhan’s works.
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The other thing to consider with open source is that the developer is under no obligation to implement anyone’s use cases but their own. To use the cliché, they are scratching their itch. And thus the flat cleaning analogy falls flat (pun!), because as far as the developer is concerned, it more than likely meets 90+% of what they wanted to accomplish.
Furthermore, they recognize that their needs might not be your needs. And by providing the source you are welcome to make the changes to meet your use cases.
At least that is the theory. In practice most folks do not have the knowledge or skills, or even the ambition, to do so. In the case of the OP, I suspect he wants to be editing images, not code.
So while it is valid to state that an open source project doesn’t ones needs, and request changes, complaining that a project does not misses the point. And shows an unwarranted sense of entitlement. There is another cliché about beggars and choosers which may be apt here.
Contrast this with a commercial project such as the aforementioned Sublime Text. The developers of Sublime have a vested interest in addressing the use cases of their customers, as they want to sell licenses. And as we saw with the Overcast kerfuffle, if you do not meet those needs customers will look elsewhere.
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There is another side here.
As you probably know, US Department of Justice has demanded Google sells Chrome. It isn’t Google’s fault they have created a hightly successfull web search engine and a hightly successfull web browser. But nevertheless now this is a monopoly.
Similar with open source. If some project is used by a really large amount of people, its not fair to consider it as “just for fun” thing of those guys who develop it. Regardless of their will, now they have moral responsibility.
Absolutely. Although - and this takes awhile to come to grips with sometimes - they’re interested in meeting the needs of their customers, not any random person with $100 to spend.
There are plenty of apps that I would buy if they implemented Feature X, but it’s not on their roadmap because they have a user base that either cares about other things more, or would be actively unhappy if they did what I’d like them to do. So those products just aren’t for me.
Some of this conversation reminds me of A Sandwich, A Wallet, and Elizabeth Taylor's Cousin | 43 Folders from Merlin’s old blog.
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You have a higher view of humanity than I do if you think people are going to spend countless hours on a project out of a sense of “moral responsibility” if they are doing it in their spare time. The sweet spot is acting morally so that your customers fork over cash to support you. It is usually good business to treat your paying customers well. But if they are not paying why should they bother with the extra effort?
I think there’s something to be said for the fact that the average person wants to do a good job. But as you said, it comes back to time. If I can do an excellent job in 30 hours, or a tolerably-decent job in 10, and what I have is 10, it’s a question of whether you’d rather have a non-polished feature or no feature at all.
But that’s the thing - it is. “Fun” might be the wrong word to be using here, since frequently it’s not “fun” to do some of these coding projects. But it’s contributing to the betterment of society. And it’s just that - a contribution.
If you complain that people aren’t contributing properly, they stop contributing. That’s how volunteer projects work. Please trust me on this - I’m a state-level director for a nonprofit. It’s hard enough to get volunteers sometimes when the work is well-defined, easy-to-do, and you express appreciation. Eliminate any of those three things and it gets much, much harder.
I believe all developers have a broad moral responsibility for the reasonably-expected results of what they put into the world. But that means that they should consider whether or not they want to make the thing they’re making.
The exceptions to that - the “moral responsibility” you seem to be talking about - tends to come when a company either engages in anticompetitive practices (in particular, puts other companies out of business), or structurally consists of a monopoly. For example, the power company owns the power wires, and they have a moral responsibility to not price-gouge their customers. They have a moral responsibility to not disconnect customers in the middle of winter, at least where I live.
You could, for example, potentially argue that credit card companies have a moral responsibility to not effectively economically blockade purchases of reasonably-necessary goods solely because those purchases originate from citizens of Russia.
But “you gave me this for free and it doesn’t work; you’re obligated to fix it” isn’t a sound argument. I mean, they’re not taking active measures to put Adobe out of business. There are commercially-viable alternatives. In fact, almost any commercially-viable alternative is far better software. People who rely on image processing to pay for their shoes probably don’t use GIMP.
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To be clear do good work and treat your customers well. That is morally responsible and good business. But, FOSS can only go so far when we all work to pay for our shoes. So yes time is critical.
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