12-30-2021, 02:59 PM
(12-29-2021, 05:08 PM)ac3r Wrote: It's a phone app, dude. You don't need a whole team working full-time jobs unless your business model is to make money. You can still provide a good application for free if that's your goal and intention. And it can still provide a good product. Nobody pays for Linux and is the backbone of virtually everything we use by virtue of the fact it's free and open source.
Linux is free because
1. There are zillions of people contributing so no individual would necessarily need to make it a full-time job
and
2. Some of those people are actually paid to do so by their employers who use Linux in their corporate systems, or perhaps foundations that pay them out of donations (usually from corporations who use it)
In group number 1, that group has massive overturn with a very small percentage being long-term contributors for whom that enjoyment sans recompense is enough. And group number 2 is the backbone of the project and is essentially that corporate money subsidising your free use. Driver work is often done by group number 2, employers of the hardware manufacturer making sure it works with something other than just Windows or OS X.
But if all you have is one person doing it, it becomes a hobby. Release are irregular. Bugs can go months or years without getting fixed if the owner doesn't feel "grabbed" by that particular problem or feels it's unimportant, unlike you. New features are whatever they think is neat instead of wanted by the users and often don't have UI/UX testing done on them and end up being annoyingly, unintuitively implemented. Or the author can just feel that it's time to move on to something different.
There's a lot of shitty F/OSS programmes out there, and the good ones are rare, and the good ones that evolve and grow and continue to do so for many years are rarer still. Admit it, every problem I've described above you've all encountered with F/OSS stuff that you've liked, plus other problems. I also bet that you've even had a couple of apps that you've found and liked, but then you realised it hasn't been maintained for two years and will probably stop working in two months when that new iOS or Android version rolls out.
(12-29-2021, 05:08 PM)ac3r Wrote: Suckers pay for software and greedy bastards expect suckers to pay for it.
No. People who appreciate the free versions of the good software that they've tried and will continue to use and who recognise the time and hard work that went into it, they will gladly pay for it so that it continues to get bug fixes, feature updates, and stays supported for a long time, whether that's through allowing a single hobbyist author to make it their full-time job, or for a corporation to see it as a positive investment
Your attitude of "do a lot of hard work for me completely freely without any recompense whatsoever" is selfish.