Comment by api
2 years ago
Those two things are connected.
People will spend $10 on a coffee drink at Starbucks without blinking. Suggest that they spend $10 on a piece of software and they’ll throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
2 years ago
Those two things are connected.
People will spend $10 on a coffee drink at Starbucks without blinking. Suggest that they spend $10 on a piece of software and they’ll throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
Some people. There are people who think Starbucks is too expensive. There are people who donate to open source.
I don't know anyone who doesn't think Starbucks is overpriced slop. In any European city you'll find local cafes with better quality and prices than what Starbucks sell.
They seem to only be present in the big metro areas that attract a lot of tourists, travelers and immigrants who are familiar with the Starbucks brand and go for that out of habbit and know quality, similar to how McDonald's is so popular.
Weird flex but ok. In any area big enough to have a Starbucks in the US you'll find at least one local cafe that has better coffee. You'll also find at least one with much worse coffee that thinks they're better.
As you say, people go to Starbucks and McDonalds for familiar known quality and you should be happy for it. That way the tourists and immigrants stay out of your local cafe.
Edit: to be clear I'm not defending supranational billion dollar corporations here.
4 replies →
You need to meet more people. I know many who think Starbucks is great coffee. I know others who hate it. That is diversity.
Looks like you offended some Americans' sensibilities, but it's pretty much on point outside the US. We already have a coffee culture, we don't need union-busting megacorps giving us worse for higher prices and lower worker wages, thanks.
> In any European city you'll find...
This is so ridiculously optimistic and misinformed. In Poland’s cities, for example, the cafes mainly belong to chains like Costa Coffee and Green Coffee Nero, which act identically to Starbucks in terms of prices, quality, and range of drinks. There aren’t many independent cafes left, let alone ones with lower prices than a Starbucks. Similarly, in Helsinki the choice largely comes down to chains like Espresso House and Robert’s Coffee that are no different than Starbucks.
6 replies →
People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on proprietary software.
Most of those people won’t spend $100 on open source software.
In businesses I've observed this behavior tends to surround dysfunctions in liability and understanding of liability organizationally and from business management.
If you make a purchasing decision, your ass is on the line when people ask why certain product/service isn't fulfilling some arbitrary business need. In theory, assuming the functionality is part of the advertised purchase, the liability of the thing you're paying for lies on that third party. You did your due diligence. If you chose some open source combination with in-house build, they're going to question why you didn't outsource some envisioned cheaper third party option (sometimes, this is a legitimate strategy, often from my experience it's not). So you default to big vendor big solution to protect yourself.
Apologies are made and blah blah, discussions about "what alternatives do/did we have" and you often end up landing on implementing some mixture of leveraging public domain software and in-house customization atop/leveraging it to solve the problem you were paying for. In the end, you end up doing what you probably knew was the correct path anyways: this vendor solution is questionable, it doesnt completely align with our business needs, and it's not going to get the actual need done. Conveying that to business leaders is often impossible though. So, to pass liability/responsibility and cover your ass with incompetent business leadership, you throw often thousands, tens, or hundreds of thousands away.
I've had this discussion so many times and sat in these meetings so many times it grows tiring. The fact is, sometimes a generic solution works for your business (Office for example is a pretty generic need and often aligns), often it really doesn't (some arbitrary more niche/custom thing you do? Maybe, good luck).
I had this moment of cognitive dissonance when I noticed that one colleagues would use "open source" as a synonym for "poor quality". Context: I was working as a contractor, for a bank. That colleague was managing a bunch of *nix instances used to deploy our web services.
Because open source projects are not products per se. If you use mostly a proprietary software, open source project can be perceived as "poor quality product".
if they had to pay for open source then they couldn’t afford to pay for commercial software?
Yep, and if you ask them to they will throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
Correct. They've learned the behavior that attacking someone's ego, sense of fairness, or duty pays off and costs little. Almost everyone in customer service or non-profit space has to deal with these leeches.
Easy to defeat, fatal to ignore.
Hm, why do you think that is? Do programmers just respect each other less than they respect baristas?
If Starbucks started giving the drinks away for free, I doubt people would still pay $10 for it.
Because they got trained to think that way by the "free as in speech and free as in beer" and "Why pay for Windoze? (sic) Linux is free" marketing the early FOSS advocates used.
Overwhelming majority of people don't buy 10$ coffee. They just don't do it.