I think the developers generally understand that. No sensible person goes into FOSS for the money. It's the customers - consuming non-developers - who have a problem of expectations.
well, going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something. This is best case scenario though, and you need to have resources/other sources of income for the time it needs to get widely adopted and popular (or the very possibility that it will not happen at all)
> going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something.
Right, and then people try to do that, fail to sell whatever it is that they thought they would, and end up putting some sort of annoyance on the code to punish those who are using it.
But every person, sensible or not, has bills to pay. When you say "no sensible person goes into FOSS for the money" you are saying "most people can't afford to actively maintain a FOSS project", and you really can't claim that is in any way good for FOSS.
That doesn't sound like much of a change from the last 30 years. FOSS has done fine so far.
Really the only thing that might work is if there was broad community acceptance of not changing all the lower parts of the software stack all the time so the maintenance burden is lower.
Honestly; if we were interested in what was good for FOSS all that needs to happen is that hardware stops improving all the time. Then everyone can calm down, declare things finished and move on without requirements changing. The Linux graphic system (c.f. Xorg v. Wayland) still hasn't finished adjusting to graphics cards. That sort of change is bad for FOSS.
In a sense, this sort of thing is what is being showcased here. The breaking changes to FUSE are probably going to be linked to design changes in Catalina triggered by RAM/CPU/Network changes and the RPM/SSD transition that has been going on for however long. When that sort of thing subsides in 50 years there is going to be this amazing FOSS renaissance as working things stop breaking because of hardware changes and the balance really tilts towards free & available software.
So what? Maybe FOSS cannot get us a competitive modern desktop, but in many areas open source projects have virtually eliminated all proprietary competition. Linux is running everywhere these days and e.g. in databases it is among the open source options where the growth is. Does FOSS need to be able to solve all software problems in the world for you to count it as successful?
Only if by everywhere you mean cloud centers, where the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft have their golden eggs not shared with the community.
If you are going to mention ChromeOS or Android, ChromeOS is hardly a blip outside US school system, and what kernel is being used on Android is irrelevant to user space, there is Fuschia on the horizon and Google has been replacing everything, with the Linux kernel being the last piece of GPL code standing.
Then if you mean embedded, plenty of IoT OS are MIT based and even Linux Foundation now has Zephyr as alternative to Linux, all operating systems where OEM can profit without giving anything back.
If you mean compilers, plenty of embedded OEMs are now happy LLVM users free of contributions, while reducing their development costs.
> That doesn't sound like much of a change from the last 30 years. FOSS has done fine so far.
Compared to what knowledge of how good it could be if we had a more sustainable model than hoping someone has the charity or hobby to work on something we need for free?
This reminds me of when gamers assert how game modding has done fine so far limited to just labors of love and weekend hobbyism. Though I'm sure gamers are more coming from an angle of not wanting to pay for anything, we can only imagine the gaming mods we'd have if we had more of a culture around allowing people to work full-time on things we enjoy instead of only waiting for the few hobbyists with the masochism or compulsion to do it.
Modding is fundamentally different, because it's always beholden to the whims of the IP owner of the original game. They tend not to allow people to build profitable mods, since they see that profit as rightfully theirs.
The charitable part of the economy is pretty effective. You need to compensate people a lot before they'll do for you what they might otherwise do for free.
I'm not sure the argument "FOSS has done fine so far" is that convincing when you then lay out many of the places where FOSS has been failing miserably.
Not to forget the many, many places where it has and is succeeding happily.
Here's my "get off my lawn" perspective: those developers who remember a world where there was little or no free software (from, say, the mid-1980's, when Sun made the C compiler a for-cost option on SunOS through until commercial Linux distributions), have a visceral understanding of free software that those who came to it later, and (perhaps understandably) take it for granted, don't have.
Free software is a commons. In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.
> In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.
It's entirely because many of these projects are run by professional software developers, not professional managers. So many projects with single maintainers are that way because the maintainer feels a sense of ownership rather than a sense of stewardship.
It's not to say that solo maintainers are bad people; just that the jobs of writing software and coordinating software development require different, non-overlapping skill sets.
I don't think there's any question that this is true.
There are some efforts to address it (eg. SSL, Mongo, etc), but they're the first "drafts" if you like.
When a majority of the users of free software were programmers themselves, things were quite different to today. The world has changed, but the free software model has not kept pace.
With hindsight, I think the "Open Source" definition can be seen as a turning point, and the issues we have today stem from the decisions to give everyone the use of free software, even those who aren't of the community, or able to contribute in turn.
I don't think that was a bad or wrong decision, but I think that the ramifications are still playing out.
Most people can't afford to do effectively anything other than go to work and flop on the couch.
I don't think that's a problem for FOSS, it's a problem (if you call it such) of the economic system that we live under.
Generally the only realistic answer to that for most people at an individual level is to focus on financial security so that you don't have to care about that sort of fluff.
Most people can't. That's how our world works. In the general case creatives earn effectively nothing and only a few blockbuster individuals 'make it', regardless of the field; and usually they have to go proprietary to some extent.
"Most people can't afford to actively maintain a FOSS project" has always been true. It has been a hobby for some, a privilege allowed by the workplaces of others, and in a few rare cases companies have been built that charge for consulting and manage to fund a distro or other project that way. Or dual-license tech like Trolltech.
> It's the customers - consuming non-developers - who have a problem of expectations.
If FOSS zealotry wasn't a thing, then said expectations would be unreasonable. Sadly we live in a world where many people can withstand the cognitive dissonance of "You should use FOSS" and "You shouldn't complain about it because it is free".
