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?
I have been using computers since the early 1980's, using Linux and Windows for over 30 years now.
Money is not the issue. Microsoft and Google are among the largest contributors in the OS community, most meaningfull packages have been bought, adopted by larger companies. The problem is the Linux community itself. How many distributions are there? Every piece of Linux software has to run on all these ditro's, that is impossible without compromises.
For corporate use OS is hardly usable, most companies want support contracts on everything they use and that is not possible.
In my opinion, the contributions to open source by Google and Microsoft are insignificant when compared with the sheer volume of software that has, and is being developed by the open source community.
The level of diversity exhibited by the endless variety of Linux distributions is a very good thing. It mirrors a diverse society with many different needs and requirements. This ecosystem provides robustness and flexibility, it gives society resilience against the increasing threats posed by malicious actors and demonstrated stupidity by corporate ICT incompetence that keeps occurring.
The level of compatibility within Linux distributions is breathtaking when you actually start looking at the details, mainly because they're all running the same kernel. Frankly, I'd like to see more kernel design and development, not less.
More Bazaar, less Cathedral please!
Microsoft and Google are the company with the highest number of contributions to the Open Source community, that is in volume.
The problem with the diversity is that, because they all know it better, there isn't any perfect distro. If they would work together and fix all the flaws that make people choose another distro it would be perfect and compatitive, now it's just not.
Except that this is just not true. If it were, there'd be only one car, one bike, one house, one pair of underpants and one type of food.
Humans love to find something that's unique, it's why Starbucks makes a gazillion types of coffee and people choose to buy it there, customised to their level of "uniqueness", or elsewhere.
There is no one Linux distro and that's it's strength.
Car manufacturers came to the same conclusion and tada there is Stellantis and 50% of all cars came from the same factory. Houses are pre-fab for decades. Humans love brands but many items come from the same factory just with another label.
That there are so many Linux distro's is why it's still a niche on desktops and it will always stay that way.
I get your point but staryucks used to add caffeine for more addictiveness.