Why is Open Source built with closed tools?
medium.com
medium.com
> For all of the options there are open options available, but yet it seems that in the daily grind the value of “freedom” diminishes when proprietary products offer a better overall experience.
I love me some open tools. Open tools are getting a lot better over time. But, people are not often enough finding them to be better to use than the closed tools. The closed tools are not free-as-in-beer, but they are cheap enough to justify their cost.
> Tweaking and tuning a free product compared to purchasing a license or subscription to a service is just more convenient — and potentially cheaper.
Theoretically, this might be possible. But practically, it's not panning out for the tools mentioned in the article. Sublime text cost $70. A senior engineer tweaking and tuning a free text editor for a single hour is more expensive than that.
The real question is
> Is it just because closed products by nature create better user experiences, where as Open Source is best at low level things that are a commodity?
Open source does have some conflict with the nature of humans. It suffers greatly from the Tragedy of the Commons. That's not a black&white, unavoidable doom sentence. It's an obstacle that must be directly addressed if an open project hopes to succeed.
Secondly, even if this is true, isn't it maybe because a lot of traditionally proprietary software companies /developers are now contributing to open source?
When it started, people writing FOSS were doing it for different reasons than today.
If there was no other benefit beyond freedom for the creation in an open manner (as a thought experiment let's say one could perfectly test software for bugs and security issues, and that adding functionality didn't necessitate access to source code), do you believe Foss would be as popular as it is today?
The beautiful thing about sharing your code is there are more than one 'right' reason to do it.
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