Syncthing is everything I used to love about computers
I&#x27;ve come to realize that open source is the only type of software worth investing into. No matter how great a commercial piece of software might be, sooner or later it&#x27;s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn&#x27;t suit you. Commercial software has to constantly chase profit for the company to stick around. This necessarily means that the product has to continue evolving to chase what&#x27;s currently in vogue. And if a company fails to do that, then it will die and the software will stopped being developed.<p>This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a product that you rely on. Instead of the product being adapted to your needs, it&#x27;s you who has to adapt to the way the product evolves, or spend the time investing in a different product.<p>On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they&#x27;re often developed by the users who themselves benefit from these projects. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams.<p>Evolution of GNOME is a great example of this. There are now many flavors of GNOME all catering to different workflows, and users don&#x27;t have to compromise their preferred way of doing things to chase how GNOME is evolving. Meanwhile, users of Windows or MacOS have very little choice but to continue adjusting to the ways Apple and Microsoft choose to evolve the desktop. Microsoft even uses DMCA to prevent users from doing customization. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;removing-annoying-windows-10-features-is-a-dmca-violation-microsoft-says-200611&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;removing-annoying-windows-10-featur...</a>