1mo ago

checkmate

90 comments

It's funny because apps like Blender and Krita are actually competitive to proprietary software.
- And Linux/BSD are so good proprietary developers rip them off to whatever degree legally permissible.
  
  Microsoft servers also use linux
- Blender had a reeeeaaally long way though, I remember a time where Blender was quite big already but Maya just was miles ahead in terms of usability. Nowadays they are not only even, Blender is probably used more often since it's not only free but more people know how to use it than Maya
  
  And also maya sucks.
  
  I tried blender in those old days but stuck with cinema 4D at the time, blender really sucked. These days it's totally awesome kinda wish I had more time for it but I'm focused on other things.
- And Firefox, git, Dia, gimp, etc...
  Proprietary OS's like Windows and macOS lack package managers too that tools like chocolatey and homebrew provide.
  
  Dia and gimp are ok, but they’re still quite behind the curve. I love floss and wouldn’t use the closed alternatives, but we got to know where we stand.
  
  There are proprietary VCS?
  
  Windows has WinGet now, which is a built in package manager. It might not be as good as most linux distro package managers, but it does exist.
  
  And OBS
- Krita is fucking slow though :/

Read "The Mythical Man-Month".
Basically, a team of 5-8 motivated developers can create high quality, medium complexity software extremely fast.
But if the project is just a little too complex for one team of devs and you need more people, then you'll need a lot more people. And a lot more time.
Cause the more people you add to the project, the more overhead you have. Suddenly you need to pull devs off coding to bring new hires up to speed. You need to write documentation on coding style guidelines, hold meetings, maintain your infrastructure, negotiate with hardware suppliers, have someone fix the server room's door locks, schedule job interviews, etc. etc.
- “What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”
- Counterpoint: 'The Brooks's Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.'
  Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s05.html
  
  Nice.
- It absolutely fucking BAFFLES me that Brooks' Law isn't known by every software manager on the planet.
  I've quoted it so many times at work, even in engineering focused teams in at least two big tech companies. It's not a concrete fact, but it explains why so many teams are hilariously shit at delivering software.

I love this meme because every app on my phone designed by a company worth more than a million dollars fucking sucks, and the best app on my phone is RIF, an app designed by a single developer, and reanimated into a lich by a team of programmers for free
- Wait wait wait... RiF ain't dead?!
  
  I would say it's undead. Like a Lich. The fine folks at revanced.app have done an amazing job reanimating it. It's just as good as it was last June!
  This guide should help
- Same for Apollo and now Voyager. Probably the best-designed and -implemented apps I’ve ever used.
  
  +1 for Voyager! Writing this comment using it :-)
- Wait RIF was reanimated? In what way?
  
  "somehow RIF returned.."
  
  This guide should help
  https://github.com/KobeW50/ReVanced-Documentation/blob/main/Reddit-Client-ID-Guide.md
  It might seem daunting depending on your experience with computers, but the guide was good enough for my tech-illiterate ass
- I have no clue how much British Gas is worth, but that is the worst app ever. Doesn’t update your bill/balance in anything approaching real time. Frequently doesn’t let you log in.

"Dear floss4life,
Our developers have encountered an issue while using the open source framework you published on github. We have lost as many as 400 user accounts. The estimated cost of this error is $6800.
This is unacceptable. Be a professional and fix it immediately.
Chad Elkowitz, MBA, Gruvbert and sons Finance Lt"
- That's why the no warranty clause is by far the most important in any license granting access to the public
  
  And it’s also why many companies refuse to use open software. It baffles me that no insurance company saw this as a market opportunity to sell open source software insurance.

I've actually found a lot of the smaller foss tools I use are better than their proprietary counterparts because of the design philosophy and that people don't cut as many corners on passion projects as when they're on a deadline
- For real. I just spent a decade in academia working dog hours with little pay keeping services running wondering how the true devs and sysadmins do it.
  I recently switched to the corporate world and have peeked behind curtain of competency: headless chickens running around, patching failing products rather than spending time to properly fix them because immediate results are the only metric that counts.
  Stability, scalability, reproducibility? Forget it, that's someone else's problem apparently.
  
  The reason this bothers me so much is how hard it makes it to get a job
  I've seen people in other companies getting paid significantly more than me who just have zero clue what they're doing
  
  Late stage capitalism.
  The issue is that capitalism fundamentally requires forward thinkers and enlightened (or at least rational) perspective to function sustainably.
  But capitalism rewards short term thinking, everywhere from corporate leadership, to the workforce, to the consumers caught by ads designed to catch and hold their ever-shortening attention spans.
  Fundamentally, it needs regulation to thrive. The true cost of a purchase, including environmental and decommissioning/disposal costs must be tied to the initial purchase value. Through this, we might get a functional capitalism.

It's hilarious that you think that proprietary software is actually better.
- CAD Software?
  
  Add to that photo editing (as much as GIMP is great...). I would guess DAW and video editing would fall under that category, too...and good luck finding many AAA open source games.
  
  If only Autodesk didn't exist, then yeah
- Well, sometimes it happens. Lemmy was semi-broken during the APIocalypse, and there still isn't such a thing as a FOSS Facebook, or search engine backend for that matter.
  
  I have heard that friendica is similar to facebook
  
  I haven't really looked into it, but isn't Friendica supposed to be the FOSS Fediverse Facebook?
- Adobe products often have no real equal. It sucks, but it's the way it is. Gimp doesn't come close to Photoshop, Inkscape is almost as good as Adobe Illustrator, and After Effects is the most capable video editing software I've ever used.
  It sucks that they try and lock you into proprietary file formats, like Substance Painter.
  
  Yeah, the only software that can stand toe to toe with Adobe is Affinity, and they're winning at the no subscription pricing. Other than that Adobe is really no equal when it comes to FOSS, a lot of those alternative is just us tolerating the flaw. Used to do stuff with photoshop, illustrator, flash, and after effect, switching to foss is...rough. Like you said, Gimp is barely usable, inkscape is good but far behind illustrator, and i don't think flash and after effect have any foss alternative when i looking for it. The only free alternative to after effect that is good is davinci resolve, but that's still proprietary.

i want to boil people like this alive
in minecraft of course
- Minetest*
  
  Luanti*

“What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”

80/20
I live by this rule, it made me gain so much credibility and money from people who don’t know any better. 80/20 <3
20 percent of work nets you 80 percent of result (except no one knows what I did isn’t 100 percent) bam 4/5 of time saved. Everyone is happy and if something doesn’t work we can just blame it on client
- I follow the 80/20 rule recursively. as soon as I've gotten 80% of the way there for 20% effort I immediately stop, and start a brand new project for the remaining 20%. Bam! 96% complete for only 24% effort.
  taps forehead

Are most open-source software developed by hobbyists?
- well, most as in numerically, technically yes :D
- yes and they either become popular because of their usefulness and get organized like firefox/mozilla or they get co-opted by corporations and invariably enshitified like chrome/chromium
  
  Firefox/Mozilla as an example is a bit of a stretch, given the fact that Mozilla Browser/Firefox is originally based on the open-sourced version of Netscape Navigator
  
  firefox is squarely in the "co-opted by corporations and invariably enshitified"
- There is a very large corpus of FLOSS software out there serving everything from individual itches to whole industries. Any project that is important to someone's bottom line is likely to have paid developers working on it but often alongside hobbyists.
  The project I predominately work on is about 90% paid developers but from lots of different companies and organisations. Practically though the developers don't care about the affiliation of the other developers they work with but the ideas and patches they bring to the project.
  
  That seems like a better system than say, Godot, who picks and chooses who is allowed to contribute.
- 100% of the open-source software i contributed to was developed by hobbyists so, using that information, you can infer from only that information that only hobbyists can develop open-source software

“All-star” makes me worried there’s some hidden society of super competent developers remaining at the big software corps that we somehow never noticed.

Because it can't be turned into a service

Star designers and engineers don't do Open Source? 🥺

the issue with this argument is that i don't care about who made the app when it doesn't work. that's why i still have a chromium based secondary browser, it doesn't matter that it's the work of a billion dollar company trying to get a monopoly when the website i'm on is broken. yes, the blame is on who made the website, not firefox. i still need to be able to use it somehow

.. that depends on this FOSS app.

You forgot to mention that they will let you use it for cheap until everyone got used to it and then crank up the price by 500%

Venn diagram go brrrr

90 comments