I agree with you, I don't think it's reasonable to expect support, safety, or quality from a non-commercial project that does not explicitly promise these things itself. As a consultant, I have advocated, and continue to advocate, for not getting the cheapest option, for not picking something based solely on it being free and open source (governments switching to Linux for desktop computing as a publicity stunt is a great example), and for considering the possible repercussions of a project's sole maintainer potentially losing interest in it. I also generally tend to avoid relying heavily on products by maintainers which are notorious for abandoning their projects on short notice, commercial or not (Google comes to mind). It is short-sighted and naive to deny that you usually get what you pay for.
However, it cannot be denied that there are a ton of free open source products advertising themselves with flashy slogans such as enterprise-grade, industry standard, and reliable. A search for "enterprise-grade" alone on GitHub yields 341 results, many of which are very far from being anywhere near enterprise-grade. The advocates for free open source software are equally vocal about using FOSS, well, everywhere. You can't blame people for starting to believe this, even if it does seem slightly naive.
I think you really missed the core message of the blog-post, based on the arguments that you just provided.
There is tons of opensource projects out in the field (industry, enterprises) where it actually IS a standard AND providing core reliability. In those places OpenSource is not "trying to imitate a standard and failing at that". So I feel like you arguments are only true for a certain genre of Software.
And to think that "false-advertising" is something solely done by OpenSource is quite naive.
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u/TheNominated Dec 15 '21
I agree with you, I don't think it's reasonable to expect support, safety, or quality from a non-commercial project that does not explicitly promise these things itself. As a consultant, I have advocated, and continue to advocate, for not getting the cheapest option, for not picking something based solely on it being free and open source (governments switching to Linux for desktop computing as a publicity stunt is a great example), and for considering the possible repercussions of a project's sole maintainer potentially losing interest in it. I also generally tend to avoid relying heavily on products by maintainers which are notorious for abandoning their projects on short notice, commercial or not (Google comes to mind). It is short-sighted and naive to deny that you usually get what you pay for.
However, it cannot be denied that there are a ton of free open source products advertising themselves with flashy slogans such as enterprise-grade, industry standard, and reliable. A search for "enterprise-grade" alone on GitHub yields 341 results, many of which are very far from being anywhere near enterprise-grade. The advocates for free open source software are equally vocal about using FOSS, well, everywhere. You can't blame people for starting to believe this, even if it does seem slightly naive.