Comment on I wish there were more articles about tech not tech biz

• Corgana@startrek.website ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If your barometer for “potential” relies on market share, then you don’t really understand what motivates a person to contribute effort to a FOSS project in the first place.

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  • Quicky@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What’s your barometer, bearing in mind you said it had the potential to be a silver bullet? Silver bullet for what?

    I don’t want to sound defensive, but please don’t assume I’m not invested in FOSS. I’m on Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed and am the developer of half a dozen small FOSS projects on GitHub.

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    • Corgana@startrek.website ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Great question. I’ll answer with “At achieving the task it was designed for.” Because unlike corporations, open source software has no goals outside of being what it is. Let me put it another way: from my individual perspective, the “Year of the Linux Desktop” was 2022. I do not think it’s correct to say that Linux can have “market share” because it exists outside the market. By not using proprietary software we are exiting the market.

      I’m not making the argument that Linux should not be accessible or attractive for new users, but that “popularity” has no real bearing on determining success because it’s success as a tool can only determined by the individual. Describing Linux as “competing” with anything only makes sense if you are a company trying to make money from an operating system. Popularity itself is only important insofar as it helps with attracting new and better devs.

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      • Quicky@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Linux absolutely does not exist “outside the market”, that’s absurd. Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE etc aren’t charitable organisations. These major contributors to the Linux kernel aren’t doing so out of love for their fellow man.

        For you, yes, Linux is “free” if your measurement of cost is purely financial outlay.

        There’s a great back and forth here, and the original thread on Mastodon, which nicely covers both the evangelism (my original issue) and the “cost” of Linux. There’s plenty of reactions in there from people talking about the same things, from both sides of the coin.

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