I see comments on posts such these very often where people complain about opensource products like Linux phones, Linux itself, or pretty much anything else, not being as good as their proprietary, funded, and profits driven alternatives. How are such projects supposed to compete without money and full-time developers? Especially when people are unwilling to donate to them "because they just aren't there yet", how do they expect the projects to quickly get to a point where they are boob friendly and usable?
People will disparage groups that try to make something with barely any funding and time. There are so many negative comments about the PinePhone, Phosh, PostMarketOS, and so on. It's disappointing to have such a community.
As soon as an opensource project asks for funds, integrates a question for funds in their software, uses a restrictive license or something like a business source license, someone will complain about it on social media and blow up the maintainers' repository and socials. Why are we so averse to opensource contributors earning a living writing opensource?
If people don't want to fund opensource (or "source available") until "it's ready" and resist any attempt to make money from it, how it the model supposed to succeed in being an alternative for the majority?
Sorry for the rant, but why can't we as a community be more active in supporting our opensource contributors instead just waiting for the apples to fall into our and their laps?
The link between Open Source and money has a long and in my professional opinion troubled history. Driven by the desire to create free, as in unencumbered by special interest, the messaging has been diluted to include free, as in no financial cost. This discrepancy has been exploited by big companies who use this to their advantage and take without giving back.
As a result licencing has been stretched and massaged to combat this exploitation. Several organisations have attempted to find ways of funding this to more and lesser degree.
Many software developers have contributed for decades to this endeavour for free as a way to contribute to society, but ultimately this is not sustainable and more and more developers are getting disillusioned with the whole thing.
Quality is generally speaking much better, despite ignorant commentary from the sidelines. Just look at the quality and level of response to CVE issues as they become known.
I use Linux as my primary desktop and have done so since the turn of the century. I've been writing software for over 40 years, much of the last 25 years that has been open source.
There are moves to improve things, Bruce Perens is for example working on some called Post Open.
The alternative, a world run by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft is not one that's in the interest of planet Earth and if you look closely, you'll discover that much of their software stack is based on open source software.
Out of interest, would you say something can be done against this, or is this a systematic problem of how capitalism works?
For example, would it make sense to license your open source software under a more restrictive license (preventing commercial use, use in closed source projects etc.)? Or would that go against the principle of open source?
I know this is a long debate with many pros and cons, but I am interested in your opinion as you seem to know what you are talking about.
In my opinion, Open Source was envisioned as a common good for the benefit of all. This was true for the internet and its governing protocols at birth.
Then the Green Card spam hit Usenet and the commercial potential for the internet became apparent and exploitation began.
There are moves to attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, but the reality is, regardless of licensing, that this is only likely to occur due to people standing up for their rights in a courtroom, something that takes obscene amounts of money.
Having a patent or trademark is meaningless unless you defend them. The same is true for open source licensing.
Drastic levels of change have been attempted by unilaterally making something suddenly closed, but anyone can fork the code at that point and carry on. Anyone dependent on the product can choose to pay the fee for the newly licensed product, or choose to migrate to the fork.
The only thing I can see that might change this is governments deciding that anyone using public funding for any reason is required to make the product open source (or open data). I don't see this happening (yet) in the vast majority of democracies around the world.
That said, the current USA administration is doing an admirable job at encouraging people to stop trading with them and in the process discovering that there are plenty of open source options for traditional closed source offerings. More and more governments are evaluating open source as a result.