Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?
I hate to be contrarian but I can&#x27;t understand what the point of this article is. It&#x27;s a bit meandering and quite cynical.<p>For example, I agree that the company behind MuseScore has exhibited some bad behavior that is worth discussing, but their attempt to introduce opt-in telemetry to Audacity is difficult to classify as adding &quot;spyware.&quot;<p>Also, the article meanders through a lot of different points that have very little in common other than being cynical. For some reason, it starts talking about stuff that isn&#x27;t related to open source. It also talks about a lot of different issues regarding open source. I don&#x27;t understand what the overarching message is, except for something along the lines of &quot;all software development sucks.&quot;<p>The conclusion also strikes me as a little bit dramatic too:<p>&gt; I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. If I make Rig Open Source, it could very well do more harm than good, regardless of whether I get paid! And if I don’t, it won’t get used anyway.<p>1. I don&#x27;t understand why it&#x27;s likely to do more harm than good, or by what measure. How does this tie into previous examples? How do you <i>expect</i> it to be &quot;exploited&quot;?<p>2. It doesn&#x27;t seem to approach the completely valid question of <i>why</i> developers don&#x27;t like using closed-source tools.<p>3. It seems to imply that the mere act of releasing software <i>should</i> entail some kind of payday or recognition, but that doesn&#x27;t make any sense. I agree open source is undervalued, but so are a lot of things. Ask people who draw if they feel like their skill is valued appropriately; it&#x27;s not. The reason why businesses are able to make money off of software is because they don&#x27;t <i>just</i> write software, they also sell it. Even if you&#x27;re trying to live off of donations, you still have to &quot;sell&quot; it. Look at how well-branded successful projects like Blender and Krita are! And a lot of projects use the &quot;progress report&quot; blogging format similar to the one successfully used by dolphin-emu to engage with the community. It&#x27;s <i>a lot</i> of non-programming work.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to devalue anyone. I can just about guarantee that if you do the selfless job of putting quality open source into the world, it will never, <i>ever</i> be paid at market rate. But that&#x27;s the price you pay for being able to do whatever you want. An artist, 99.99% of the time, cannot make money creating whatever they like; most would probably only ever find serious success in graphic design. I think open source is a wonderful asset and has produced some amazing artifacts for us to enjoy that have done enormous good for the world. Can you even quantify the amount of good done by having a robust production-ready operating system used by everyone from budding geeks in gradeschool to production servers at Fortune 500 companies?<p>I hope you find whatever you are looking for, and I don&#x27;t like being dismissive. But I urge people to see the non-cynical side of this.