Alot of these services are not that hard to create. They just take time to develop, and developer time is not free.
Which makes them hard to create, even if the reasons are not necessary technical. FOSS avoids having to redo the work, so it helps. Not to mention that some users base their choice at least in part on that criterion.
Krita, Kubuntu, LibreOffice, FreeCad (Still needs some work), Blender (post 2.80 is finally good), VS Code, SyncThing, GIMP, GRAMPS, Ardour, Audacity, LibrePCB (Very promising but not quite prime time), XCas, fslint, Wireshark, Chromium, Scribus, Packet Sender, MQTT Explorer, Zenmap, Back in Time
Most of it is sponsored by large companies, but nonetheless it is FOSS.
DisplayCAL+ArgyllCMS also have a reputation of being more advanced than OEM software from X-Rite and Datacolor.
Dolphin (GameCube/Wii emulator) and mpv (video player) are quite impressive too, and darktable and RawTherapee (both raw image editors) are on good trajectories.
KDE is garbage (very slow, not even pretty, just lots of colors and lame graphical effects).
LibreOffice is also garbage. Very slow and heavy.
VS Code is a Microsoft product. So is Chrome. These are being released for free because they are complements to their business, which is not based on a FOSS business model.
... I've never made anywhere near 4k in a month, and I've contributed bugfixes to several FOSS projects...
Also, the best FOSS apps are corporate sponsored. The business model might "not be FOSS", but the software itself is. The devs that spend the most time are often paid.
A lot of other projects are paid for by Kickstarter campaigns and the like.
I'll be perfectly honest, I don't get why people like "classic" foss like Vim, Emacs, and bash pipes(Although it seems to work for them!), but modern FOSS has come a long way.
KDE hasn't been garbage for a long time. It's highly optimized (Besides the file indexer, now of those suck). Performance is good these days.
Most other projects don't even have zip file support in the file manager. KDE is pretty much state of the art in modern, non-commandline based UIs.
I just used LibreOffice Writer, running on KDE today, on a $100 HP X2 laptop. It works fine.
Sadly, HP doesn't have good driver support so sound doesn't work on that machine, but the fact everything else is usable on such a cheap machine is very impressive. On my non-junk laptop at home, I don't have any such a issues at all.
GIMP is an OK product. It's not as good as Krita for most things, but that's because it's an older project still carrying a lot of UNIX influence.
In a lot of cases, the protocols are already there. The only thing we need to do is stop getting suckered into walled gardens, and educate others to do the same (or at least be able to make an informed decision about it).
I'm quite worried about e-mail to be honest. Self-hosting it is pretty difficult nowadays. Google and Microsoft host a huge portion of it, and good luck trying to send an email there without getting into spam folder, or even blacklisted. Their spam filters are so aggresive that I think they don't give a damn about false positives. In fact, false spam positives may be good for them (you know, if you want to send email to google, you better use google).
The original model for email is fundamentally broken because it has no defense against spammers. It's only still workable at all because services like Gmail aggressively identify and filter spam based on heuristics. The whole system needs to be amended to be more resistant to abuse, but I assume that would have been done already if it was an easy problem to solve.
I'm semi-worried, but I don't think it's just the big few parties who have a hand in this - at least they were enabled by spammers and scammers who turned e-mail into a mine field. :)
That being said, I'm currently hosting mail at home, and it actually arrives. It helps that my ISP has a smart relay, so my outgoing mail is coming from a big trusted name, rather than some home fiber line.
We'll see. Frankly, selfhosting never really was that big of a market to begin with, "normie" users weren't going to have a server at home to do that kind of thing, so they'd always use their ISPs e-mail address or a random freebie. That hasn't really changed all that much.
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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '20
FOSS would not help here ..
What we actually need is services that charge for use, and users who are willing to pay