Re: Debian and open source scroungers

["Alexander V. Makartsev" <avbetev@gmail.com>]

On 11.10.2024 21:46, Andre Rodier wrote:

> ...
>       Please, tell me what are your thoughts on this. Am I too
>       pessimistic ? Are you, like me, thinking these companies as open
>       source "scroungers" ?
>       
>       
>       Thanks for your feedback.
>       
>       Andrew
>       
>       
>     
    I think those are all valid examples and opinions, but there is
    always more to the story and I feel like what you describe is only
    on a surface.
    If nobody contributed to Open Source software projects they would
    all simply died out a long time ago.
    Still, we have updates, even if they are delayed by a few years. But
    hey, there is always an option to patch a bug or annoying feature by
    yourself, to speed things up.
    I did that and still do, occasionally, which is very time consuming
    and it is even harder to contribute to projects, because of
    restrictions, regulations, coding styles, etc.
    For an example, many PRs on GitHub don't get approved and merged for
    years, so if I want something complete, I usually have to clone and
    cherry-pick patches all around, so it is not just "download and
    use".
    
    I believe in self-host everything approach, but it is not always
    possible or feasible, when you look at it from a security
    perspective, from an availability perspective, from a scalability
    perspective. 
    For many it is too expensive in terms of hardware, too time
    consuming, and takes too much effort to setup EveryThing™, so they
    turn to some Cloud (Ugh) provider to do it for them.
    They are hostages by choice depending on mercy of their captors, so
    naturally the captors will abuse their power in any way possible,
    from introducing subscription fees to making it nearly impossible to
    move away.
    
    
    PS: Neat work with that project of yours. I was in search of a
    complete mail server a while ago.
    I couldn't use HomeBox as-is, ended up building my own from scratch,
    using components of my choice, but it helped me a lot to learn how
    things work together and sped up the learning process.

--

 With kindest regards, Alexander.

 Debian - The universal operating system
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