I know everyone here loves FOSS, and for good reason, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t have its own issues. UX and accessibility are two I whine about regularly, but another big one is project abandonment.

I can’t tell you how many old forum/reddit posts I’ve run across of a lone developer hyping up their latest project, only for me to go to the github page and notice the last commit was 7 years ago.

If you’re not familiar with the Gemini protocol, it’s an updated alternative to Gopher, which in turn was an early competitor to the WWW back in the 90s. Gemini itself I can’t speak to, but if you go down the list of gemini servers and clients on geminiprotocol.net, you’ll see 404s, broken links, and expired certs galore. There was a flood of developer interest 5 or 6 years ago when the protocol was new, but everyone wandered away once the shiny wore off.

My recent foray into wiki software has turned up a few corpses as well. Wiki.js development seems to have stalled, and Pepperminty wiki has been abandoned for three years now.

And yes, I know this is because FOSS devs are often doing this on their own time for little to no money, so passion is the only thing driving them, but passion can only get you so far.

Besides loss of developer interest, community schisms can cause a project to sink. Remember what happened to Audacity? I think it ended up surviving but there was a real concern for a while that the forks wouldn’t be as well supported.

All the FOSS offerings I can think of that are “too big to fail” have big corporate support, like the Linux kernel.

I’m guessing most of us are self-hosting as a hobby, and we can afford to risk a loss of support when a project is abandoned, but businesses don’t have that luxury. That’s why they use proprietary software.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    18 days ago

    I’m guessing most of us are self-hosting as a hobby, and we can afford to risk a loss of support when a project is abandoned, but businesses don’t have that luxury. That’s why they use proprietary software.

    Perhaps an org whose income depends on foss should sponsor those products? Just like they pay big tech for shitty services.

  • curbstickle@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    1·
    18 days ago

    All the FOSS offerings I can think of that are “too big to fail” have big corporate support

    …

    businesses don’t have that luxury. That’s why they use proprietary software.

    Youre missing a few key things here.

    • TONS of proprietary applications go years without work or effort
    • TONS of proprietary applications/solutions get abandoned, leaving businesses and consumers to scramble for a solution.
    • If the business relies on open source, they can contribute to that project.
    • An open source solution also means continuity and the ability to fork when abandoned, proprietary solutions that are abandoned are just gone.

    I wouldn’t put much agreement toward your argument for proprietary here, because I’ve seen (and had to deal with) proprietary solutions being abandoned with no workable solution available, especially as the current generation of proprietary solutions require a license server or other cloud-connected back end in order to work.

    So when they get abandoned, its just over.

    So no, this argument against open source for business has no merits IMO.

    • early_riser@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      I’m not saying proprietary software doesn’t also have problems, just that FOSS has problems unique to it that are rarely acknowledged.

      Everything I implement at work is open source because I don’t want to wait for a purchase approval. But I’m also practically the only one interacting with those systems, so I’m the only one who’s affected if something breaks.

  • matsdis@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    18 days ago

    but businesses don’t have that luxury. That’s why they use proprietary software

    Wait, that doesn’t match my business experience. Those proprietary solutions are usually a collection of open source libraries and DBs and Elasticserach or Redis and whatever running Linux VMs held together with duct tape and a small amount of proprietary application code (compared to everything else) using five different open source frameworks.

    Or if you buy, say, a Lasercutter, how do you think they convert the images you prepare for engraving? Their own commercial libraries they bought from someone? Because businesses don’t do open source? Nope. How do you think businesses compile the firmware that goes into their CNC machine? Borland C++? Nope.

    When you use the proprietary software, they don’t tell you what went into it. That’s kind of the point - you are buying a solution and only want to know the price. When you host your own instead, you kind of need to know what goes into it, because you didn’t pay someone to do the integration for you.

    Or more fundamentally: with open source, you only get what the developer wanted to build. If you want someone to build what you need, you got to be either lucky that the two things align close enough, or find a way to pay someone to focus on your needs instead of theirs. Or you can hope someone else pays someone to make it and then pays a little bit extra to also publish it open source for everyone else to use. Rarely happens, but it does happen.

  • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    It can be frustrating looking for the current best alternative. Ive found alternativeto.net to be really good at finding all the alternatives and telling you which are worth a look.

    With my own projects, maybe 1 in 10 make it to that kind of “ready to publish” beta quality, and most get abandoned thereafter.

    Iys not really because im short on money as such. Its because im just playing around with whatever project, and quickly lose interest once it reaches that “almost kinda done” state.

    I dont really see this as a shortcoming of the FOSS ecosystem.