I’m sorry but “you need to use better applications” is very funny to read when most of the time the Linux open source alternative will never be as good as the product made by the company that has hundreds of paid employees working on it.
made by the company that has hundreds of paid employees working on it.
You’d have a point there, if the company’s aim was solely to make a better product; it’s been increasingly about increasing their margins at the expense of the users, advertising as much as possible and buying out the competition.
Except most big open source project are developed by companies, and only the tiny ones aren’t. This applies to all open source projects on all platforms.
Also, most of them already are better. People just don’t want to change their layouts and workflows. And people also don’t value privacy, which if they would, they wouldn’t rate the proprietary software as half as good.
Exactly. For example:
- LibreOffice - Collabora offers paid support for larger companies and does a ton of development on the core
- WINE - CodeWeavers has their own proprietary version (CrossOver) that they sell as a commercial product; oh, and Valve helps a ton too
- GNOME - RedHat/IBM funds it and most things in its ecosystem for its commercial customers
And so on. Most big FOSS projects are backed by one or more companies with full-time developers supporting it. The difference is that the license makes lock-in a lot less likely, since the community (read: non-paid devs) will likely patch in compatibility (i.e. file support, data export, etc).
