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Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

FOSS is something I aspire too, I still use some proprietary software but as I dream at a Star Trek world similar I dream that in future I would work only on FOSS.

If there is a choice use FOSS app A or proprietary app B I will use A if it does what I need, as a developer I adapted the open source apps to my needs where with proprietary apps I could never done it.

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I also am personally fine with "open-core", something like JetBrains or GitLab, where the commitment to FLOSS is clearly shown, even if not all versions of their product are completely FLOSS. This is however not the case with the author of this post.

I also question him being a fan, it seems to me like he's a fan of building on it, that's about it.

Do you also pay the developer of FOSS app A so that he/she can keep working on it?

The question is, will you choose FOSS even if it is a poorer choice?

Most of the time, yes. Of course it's nuanced, so it can only be evaluated on case-by-case matter, but if the FLOSS choice is "good enough", there's no need for me to look for anything else, even if it might be somewhat "better choice". Losing freedoms is way more painful than using second best software for the task.

Yes. I'd rather stick with poor-quality FOSS on my Linux setup and not contaminate it as much as is possible. I'm more than willing to pay for good software on my Mac. One can decide to do both at the same time.

Most of the time no but I feel bad for doing it and I won't try to defend my choice by attacking RMS or the FOSS ideology, the fault is mine.

Poorer choice for what? If it's something I heavily rely on - it's should be FOSS because I already experienced sitting there with a bunch of proprietary files with no way to fix the issue when the vendor was closed down.

If I need to do some short time job and there are no FOSS tools I usually buy the license for proprietary software do the work and then uninstall it. Since I can't even see if there are some obvious security vulnerabilities so why risk having it installed.

About the "poorer choice", by using not sufficiently featurefull FOSS tools you get the chance to improve those and everyone benefits.

Sometimes/often there is not even such choice. It would be great if we could even have FOSS alternatives for everything, but we are very far from such a situation.

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