Comment by wanderingmind
3 years ago
This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but you can always have access to it and not have to worry about losing your daily driver (talking to you Figma). Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.
rough at the edges
That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.
If you are a company and not an individual, nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs instead of paying some try-to-hook-you-up-with-subscriptions company.
Moreover, lots of OSS contributors are from China, Russia, India, Ukraine, etc - so a company may spend even less paying them for particular commits than buying software from bay area company.
It's more about management mindset rather than insolvable problem.
upd: And everybody wins - more quality OSS code, help developers in poor countries, less money to shitty companies like Adobe.
> nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs
company or individual, that's true. but there's still big opportunity costs and time factors. Pay someone $1000 now to perhaps get some polish/bugfixes in a release 2 months from now... and do what in the meantime? Deal with 15% more time spent in sub-par-for-my-needs software?
You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just because you paid that money, you may still not get things as you want (or when you want).
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Economics prohibits it. Consider a feature that will cost 1 month of developer time, let’s put that at $10k. 20 companies using the product want that feature, and each would be willing to pay $1k for it. No problem, right? The community would be willing to pay $20k total, and the feature would only cost $10k to implement, so why can’t it get done?
It can’t get done because every company wants to let some other sucker pay for the feature, and then free-ride after it’s implemented. No individual company would pay the $10k, because the feature is only worth $1k to them, even though it’s worth $20k to society.
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Project managing all the tools that we use to get our job done seems very distracting.
These people learn to hedge:
- Take X% of what they pay to Figma/Adobe and donate to FOSS alternatives.
- Every year, go through an exercise to look for missing features on the open source tool that still keeps you dependent on the proprietary one. Take the results from the feedback and give to the developers.
- (If you are a big company) use the results of this exercise to try to negotiate down on the price of the proprietary system you depend on. If you manage to get a discount, take it and double down on the support of the free alternative.
- Repeat until either you no longer need the proprietary solution or the open source alternative surpasses the closed one in capabilities and market share.
Keep in mind that Figma was initially started in 2012, first public release in ~2016, while Penpot just got started in 2018. Figma has a bunch of years headstart on Penpot. Give them some years and I'm sure Penpot can achieve at least as much as Figma, if not more, because of the FOSS nature of the product.
I feel like that is mainly in the consumer application space, things that have a user interface; everyone's favorite developer tooling, languages, CLI apps, etc are mostly open source.
The analogy for me has always been Snap-On hand tools vs Craftsman. If you are making a living twisting wrenches eight hours a day, six days a week, the wrench you use really does matter.
If I'm running a company (ha!) and dependent on Figma I'd still be paying for Figma while at the same time sending some funds over to Penpot as an insurance policy.
>It might be rough at the edges
Often it's not just "rough around the edges", but fully missing features that are necessary (or STRONGLY desired) for a regular professional's workflow
In biology almost nobody pays for software. A lot of it is really rough around the edges (I have to install and try to run some of it as part of my job).
It’s kinda interesting, most development is by grants and such, they don’t offer much in the way of support funding. A lot of development is fooling around taking output from a and making it work for b.
> Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.
As far as a business is concerned, Figma is still available. There is no business continuity risk.
I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. There are many open source projects that are basically dead. They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do.
A good example would be the Gorilla libraries in Go, it is still being maintained but the fact the maintainer has been looking for such a long time for someone else to take over because they don't have the time really means the library is just kinda existing.
There is a popular User library for the Symfony framework in PHP, it literally says in the docs that people are expected to move off of it because they won't maintain it and lists a bunch of reasons why. How many teams using that library would even know that?
One of the biggest complaints I've seen open soure maintainers complain about is people asking if their project is dead or not. As far as the maintainer is concerned it's maintained, when they have time. But it looks to the world that it is dead.
Just because you can get the source code and use it at any time because the license allows it doesn't mean you're able to depend on it. In fact, since you're often paying no one for it and most often not even said thanks to anyone (myself included). You're entitled to nothing, no support, no note that they won't be maintaining it, etc.
It annoys me when people think that FOSS means it's something you can depend on, when it literally comes with a license that makes sure you understand there is no warranty. That's how much you can depend on it. The person giving it to you says use at your own risk.
> I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk.
I feel the opposite, open source gives people and companies options and the ability to soldier on if someone loses interest in a technology. This site is littered with notices from companies that they intend to discontinue some paid product or service suddenly with very little notice. If a group of people or companies really care about an open source technology, it's easy enough for them to ensure the continued maintenance of something they're getting for free. Also, if you care deeply about a technology, chances are others do as well and those projects will continue well past what a commercial vendor would maintain.
You know why the site isn't littered with open source projects announcing they're getting abandoned? Because majority of the time the maintainers don't even care enough to announce it.
> They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do.
So, you've never had a commercial proprietary library your core product depends upon, being obsoleted and ceased support, without a license nor access to the code to keep maintaining it in-house? Because it happens, and I have.
And it's not just because the library was commercially inefficient, but because it got bought by a competing large corporation, who wanted to replace it in the market with their own solution, and wouldn't bother to support the library for its old users.
When this happens, at least the open source license allows you to keep supporting your use case by yourself, instead of being forced into the new solution being pushed by the vendor.
So the library got replaced with a new version? Happens in open source and often with less notice than with commerical products. And the idea of supporting the use case by yourself gets shot down. Also, you'll find money talks in these scenarios and you can pay for more support it just costs so much no one wants to do it.
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FOSS has risks too.
Yes, it can even cause you to drop out of college https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090
lol
Yeah I feel sick every time people pride FOSS/OSS only from consumers' perspective. While there's just a few way to financially sustain projects.
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Specially the risk of becoming a much better alternative.
until users get too dependent on it and the maintainers stop maintaining it... or the maintainer goes rogue... or there is a vulnerability/bug introduced by someone... and you can't easily switch to another platform
Yeah, risk for the proprietary competition.