Comment by pitched
5 days ago
I also have to eat and put a roof over my head. Tying that to a system that can change permanently at any time to something less helpful is dangerous.
Preferring open source is a risk mitigation strategy. The closed alternative may have better features to make them worth that risk though.
One feature is: it's a business and won't be abandoned due to OSS but out if it has a sustainable way to continue.
Healthy and not extremely niche Free Software projects don't disappear. My software stack I rely on daily mostly barely changed in 15 and more years.
The amount of businesses closed, sold and products abandoned or swapped for the more controlled/exploitable ones is numerous, on the other hand.
>Healthy and not extremely niche Free Software projects don't disappear.
This sounds a lot like a circular definition.
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The (almost) opposite is also a feature: it's OSS and will still be available if the business goes out of business
Companies need someone to blame who has skin in the game.
An "open source contributor" is not gonna wake up at 2AM on a Saturday because the business that someone else partially built on their free code suddenly went down.
This is ALSO, conveniently, why AI's will never completely replace human developers. You cannot blame, reward, or punish an entity that has no such sensitivities.