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What is the goal of FOSS? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm unbiased towards the subject. I'm genuinely curious about how long-term FOSS ideology would work.

I'm using FOSS but I'd still consider myself a casual user. It seems like most FOSS I've seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software, which resolves a problem the user had.

From my perspective, (and do correct me if I'm wrong) FOSS doesnt seem sustainable. Everyone can contribute, but how do they make a living? My guess is they do other things for income. And what about the few contributors who do 90% of the work?

What if every software became FOSS? Who would put in the free labor to write the software to print a page, or show an image on screen, or create something more complex like a machine learning advanced AI software?

Would it simply be that everyone provides for each other? Everyone pitches in? What about people who have bills to pay? Would their bills be covered?

This concludes my right-before-bed psychology inquiry.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It seems like most FOSS I've seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software,

That's probably confirmational bias. Plenty of FOSS projects out there that are pretty stable. If this weren't the case then we wouldn't have critical systems running Linux, FreeBSD etc. For instance, take your router, it's not only probably running Linux, but also uses several dozens of FOSS tools that are a core part of the ecosystem - if FOSS is really as buggy as you think, then critical systems like routers and basically 90% if the internet would be crashing all the time.

or create something more complex like a machine learning advanced AI software?

Ironic you should say that, because some of the best machine learning/AI tools right now are FOSS (eg Stable Diffusion, Llama 2, Claude, GPT4all etc).

What about people who have bills to pay? Would their bills be covered?

They're either paid by donations (via Patreon, Github Sponsors etc), or they get hired by companies which depend on their work (eg: see how Valve hired developers to work on various FOSS projects that the Steam Deck depends on; or the best example is the Linux kernel itself)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

If this weren’t the case then we wouldn’t have critical systems running Linux, FreeBSD etc.

Or pretty much any programming language. Or programming frameworks for that matter (in the topic of AI we got torch, tensorflow, numpy, etc.).

Or Git. Or Curl.