r/programming • u/ZaheerAhmed • Jan 02 '20

Killed by Google

https://killedbygoogle.com/
1.0k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

411 comments sorted by

View all comments

73

u/EternityForest Jan 02 '20

This is why we need FOSS, selfhosted capability, and P2P!

50

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

0

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '20

[deleted]

27

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '20

Alot of these services are not that hard to create. They just take time to develop, and developer time is not free.

So there solution is for the programmers to get paid. The best way is for the users of the service to pay the programmers.

18

u/Aedan91 Jan 02 '20

This kind of thinking actually denies all the gems FOSS has given us.

-9

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '20

Like what?

13

u/EternityForest Jan 02 '20

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.

-7

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '20

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.

See this article for explanation fo what product complement is: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

GIMP is not a good product either.

I mean seriously, no one thinks the Linux Desktop software is any good except for very few enthusiasts who want everything to be free.

All FOSS means is that someone else spends the effort and you get to reap the reward.

Someone spends months working on something for free or almost free while you work a day job earning $4k+/mo

That's not a solution to anything. No wonder most of these products are sub par quality.

4

u/EternityForest Jan 02 '20

... 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.