@Angle possibly, considering there's more people complaining about FOSS being shit than actual contributors

@Angle I still build open source software, though I doubt I'm mainstream in that regard.

@Angle in a lot of ways, yeah?

I’m of the opinion that software in general is in a sorry state right now, but several important pieces of foss don’t have enough people working on them, and the people who are working on them can’t afford to give them the level of attention they deserve.

Unfortunately, other than contributing financially, I’m not sure what we can do.

If this is true, then it seems like it would be worthwhile to find some way to allocate more effort to such things. I'm not sure quite what that means, yet, but I think it's something worth thinking about.

@Angle >tragedy of the common
let's stop with shitty liberal economics for a second.

Half of the internet rely on free software.
We"re here on a free software social network.

I'm using only free software (except drivers) in my day to day life (including on my smartphone). Every day free software get better and we get more people using linux.

@Angle well you gotta think, nobodys getting paid for any of this 🙄

@Angle I don't think that's the case at all but FOSS tends to be mired in some pretty esoteric practices that don't exactly make it inviting. when you get the time to download the required firmware to your think sponge its normally pretty solid in my experience.

You just generally have to invest your time not your money.

@Angle Not really a tragedy of the commons since we are not competing for a finite resource.

True that everything needs more work, especially around UX. For one thing, it is the nature of the bazaar-style development to progress in a less focused way. The cream rises to the top.

It may also be a widespread effect of how too many users and developers are lulled into commercial software's purported comforts: a kind of complacency induced by Stockholm syndrome.

@Angle OSS gets funding and support where it lies in the critical path of corporate interest. That's how Linux, Firefox, etc can be sustainable. And when the product is mass market in nature it creates a support bottleneck that is hard to fund.

@Angle i'm not sure about "needs". some projects have scant documentation, some have leadership/decision-making problems, and many have bit-rotted and/or been abandoned. but that's life in an ecosystem.
i would say the primary overarching problem is cultural: widespread misunderstanding of what software is. it's not magic. you can make it, and you can improve it. there's an unhelpful mental barrier between "using" and "creating".

@Angle
Not quite. Even 'tragedy of the Commons' isn't about the commons exactly but if you wonder if FOSS would be better with proprietary budgets it's not a hard question. The problems though are the same everywhere, FOSS projects just don't have the luxury of a PR department and an easy way to hide bugs and bad design from the public so every problem is a public problem by default.

@Angle
As someone who has only used Free Software and open source for his entire life, I have to ask: where are you hearing this rumor?

@Angle it's a mixed bag. in one sense, there's more open code now than ever before, by a huge margin, and "open source" is foundational to the technical economy.

in another sense, _libre_ software is in really rough shape. many large open projects with wide adoption are de facto owned & controlled by one or two megacorps. development of major projects has been captured by same. meanwhile critical pieces of infrastructure that generate many billions in revenue scrabble to survive.

@Angle imo while Software in general is broken (inconsistent, not user friendly, not safe), the open source is its broken in a special way: There are unpaid people building okay or good or great software, and there is no real model for paying them, even when large companies can only exist on their products. This leads to burnout in many ways, and only those remain who can afford to do free work on the side.

@Angle I don't think so, and I think the grousing about FOSS's shortcomings are a sign of health. Any piece of software, system, etc could always be better in some identifiable way. The fact that people give enough of a shit to analyze and complain about the shortcomings means that things can get better. Note that the same analysis also applies to other political systems...