On 11.10.2024 21:46, Andre Rodier wrote:
...
Please, tell me what are your thoughts on this. Am I too pessimistic ?
Are you, like me, thinking these companies as open source "scroungers" ?
Thanks for your feedback.
Andrew
I think those are all valid examples and opinions, but there is always
more to the story and I feel like what you describe is only on a surface.
If nobody contributed to Open Source software projects they would all
simply died out a long time ago.
Still, we have updates, even if they are delayed by a few years. But
hey, there is always an option to patch a bug or annoying feature by
yourself, to speed things up.
I did that and still do, occasionally, which is very time consuming and
it is even harder to contribute to projects, because of restrictions,
regulations, coding styles, etc.
For an example, many PRs on GitHub don't get approved and merged for
years, so if I want something complete, I usually have to clone and
cherry-pick patches all around, so it is not just "download and use".
I believe in self-host everything approach, but it is not always
possible or feasible, when you look at it from a security perspective,
from an availability perspective, from a scalability perspective.
For many it is too expensive in terms of hardware, too time consuming,
and takes too much effort to setup EveryThing™, so they turn to some
Cloud (Ugh) provider to do it for them.
They are hostages by choice depending on mercy of their captors, so
naturally the captors will abuse their power in any way possible, from
introducing subscription fees to making it nearly impossible to move away.
PS: Neat work with that project of yours. I was in search of a complete
mail server a while ago.
I couldn't use HomeBox as-is, ended up building my own from scratch,
using components of my choice, but it helped me a lot to learn how
things work together and sped up the learning process.
--
With kindest regards, Alexander.
Debian - The universal operating system
https://www.debian.org
