I find it quite surprising that the top comment on "Gnome Receives €1M from German Government" is criticising the effort, saying they spent the money on the wrong thing.
Ok, I'll say it. Thank you, German Government -- open-source needs funding, and organisations like yours helps to keep things going, making sure we get cool new features :)
Criticizing Gnome and KDE is not the same as criticizing the German effort to fund open source SW projects.
Yeah, the criticism of the effort absolutely seems misplaced.
Even the criticism of the money going to Gnome seems misplaced unless someone has gone through the criteria and identified which criteria they find unhelpful, or goes through Gnome’s application and identifies where they’ve misidentified.
Otherwise a criticism of the effort sounds simply like someone who has done no work at all, looks at an effort that has clearly put in a lot of process and safeguards (as evident simply from the application submitted), didn’t like the result but out of sheer laziness don’t even try to identify what went wrong and decided to piss all over the people who are actually putting in money, time, resources and effort to do something.
Unfortunately this is quite common in the open source world. People who don’t actually do any of the work (which includes me, even if I’ve submitted a few PRs) that go around telling the people doing the actual work that they’re doing it wrong without putting in the effort to show how or why they’re doing it wrong.
Boy it didn't take much scrolling there for the comments to get inane.
"the Micro$oft haters would have you belive that opensource is a wonderful garden of altruistic developers all helping out with each other's code for free.
Well if anyone thinks that I suggest they go and look at how many billions the companies like Debian and Redhat are worth. Nobody is working for free and it's simply do you pay for the ownership and get free support or do you get product for free and pay for support."
Yep. Those sure are the only two options when you use Linux. /s
It was and is multiple comments, on a regular basis, which is why I mentioned it. Open source, especially when very well-funded, isn’t a shield from criticism.
Quite a negative comment thread. Isn't the spirit of the site to find what's interesting in a new project rather than say it's already been done and assume the worst motivations of the developer? I for one am glad that people build tools such as terminal apps as free and open source.
>None of these projects owe anybody anything anyway
Do I owe them anything? Do I owe them silence, or to not complain, or to not tarnish their name?
Clearly as human beings we both owe each-other something, there is a social contract at play here. I'm sure you've seen the infamous "you have to decide if you're a gnome app or an everybody else app", and clearly that developer thought other projects owed them something.
But if you're just going to say "well gnome is immune from criticism because they're (paid) open source volunteers", well then what's the point of even talking to anyone? It's an amazing example of a thought-terminating cliche.
Somehow when I'm bad mouthing gnome I owe the gnome project my silent support though. It is a mystery.
They retracted that and apologized. It's unreasonable to just hold this over their heads, and in general use it to dismiss their entire project, which they have been working on for half a decade, mostly with no salary, because of one badly phrased sentence from one contributor which was then retracted.
I also think if you read the rest of what they're saying, it's probably is true that we will only get Linux GUIs which are competitive with Windows or Mac when people are willing to fund their professional development. OSS works exceptionally well for lower level components, or for components targeted at developers, because everyone involved benefits. For a professional developer a contribution acts as a good mechanism to raise your profile within the community and improve your ability to earn a decent salary elsewhere. For a company, running open source projects means they can solicit contributions and improve their profile; they contribute to other projects because it gives them a base to be able to build their products. We don't expect or find that OSS developers of high profile projects are starving in garrets, they are in fact leaders of their communities, highly prized and in-demand.
But these mechanisms do not have the same force when the consumer of the software is a general user, not a developer in the same field. i.e. when you're writing software in C++ which is then going to be used by graphic designers or artists, or by a casual user. In those case, the direct reputational benefits just aren't there, and that's why those sort of projects often struggle to take off. And on top of that those projects also involve a lot of painstaking and arguably boring work to get everything polished to a fine sheen. Krita for instance is excellent, but it has found a way to fund development through yearly crowdfunding. I think the same applies to Linux GUI's, that ultimately you need some pot of money able to support developers, which moves around according to the desires of informed consumers. In my opinion, that's what it will take for desktop Linux to become a serious mass market alternative to Mac and Windows.
"...each company needs to take some amount of responsibility for the stack that they use. A company that I worked for, sponsored upstream maintainers, sometimes for implementing specific functionality, sometimes without any specific goal. If more companies did this for their open source stacks, open source development would be much better funded."
Agreed, 100%. And yet: In a comment on Slashdot one guy said that his company had "thousands" of machines running Linux, and he was "proud" to have never paid a penny for it. I called him a parasite: open-source brings an immense value to his company, and he should support it.
My comment got a lot of hate, which I just don't understand. Sure, OSS licenses say you can do whatever you want. However, there is surely some ethical obligation to support something that your entire business depends on?
I mean, anytime the subject of giving a little money to foss developers is brought up theres, theres lots of angry people in the comments saying those developers shouldn't be given anything.
Maybe if we didn't have "critics" like you that are quick to rant and diss other people work while not doing anything themselves, highly-visible projects wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't require such steps.
I lead a fairly successful open-source project and I'm on the receiving end of this attitude of entitlement as well.
People don't realize how much work goes into developing of software and when you give it away for free, with source-code, it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" ?).
I'm sure Ubuntu, being vastly more popular and visible, receives vastly more "constructive criticism".
Hrmmm... while your comment is intended in good faith, I think it actually does a disservice to open source.
I've seen plenty of terrible quality closed source projects and even some impressive high quality closed source projects that were still imperfect and open to human error.
I don't think we should have lower levels of scrutiny or expectations from open source projects. I do think the gp's criticism was exaggerated and unwarranted for any project, open or closed.
> These threads are a great example of the problem with open source. People will complain no matter what.
Who cares if people complain? If you're writing open source software because you want a hugbox to heap you with unearned adoration, you've made a big mistake. Respect is earned in this field, that's the way it should be. There are no participation trophies; make something good if you want people to thank you for it.
You combined parts of different comments, ignored others, and claimed the combination represented all.
Some were IT managers. Some were users capable to speak for their IT managers. Some did not say. There was no reason comments should have been limited to identified IT managers.
Some asked how to make sure the feature was disabled. Some did ask for a group policy. Some asked for a plugin or separate build because a group policy would not satisfy their company's requirements. The maintainer solicited these requests even though he disagreed with the requirements.
Some blocked the update. Some rolled back. You must know unsupported software has costs.
Do people wonder why more people don't maintain open source software? Most people don't maintain open source software. They have reasons. I think they can imagine other people not maintaining open source software for the same reasons.
I maintained open source software. Attitudes like yours tired me more than the rude minority of users.
Patreon is 1 of 6 donation methods. And I don't think the people who offered to pay $50 meant monthly.
I think this is a fair criticism. You chose to share this on hackernews, which invites feedback (including constructive criticism). I don't see the problem ¯\_(?)_/¯ Do you expect people to only voice praise for open source projects?
Ok, I'll say it. Thank you, German Government -- open-source needs funding, and organisations like yours helps to keep things going, making sure we get cool new features :)
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