Hacker News Reader

I would take issue with "far more often." I guess that's true if you're searching out software on Github or the equivalent. If you're installing packages from your distribution's repository, there are tens of thousands of finished free software products (inasmuch as any software, open or proprietary, is ever finished).

View on HN

But tens of thousands of finished-ish products is a drop in the bucket compared to the total scale of FOSS software through Github/Gitlab. For GPL alone, a quick license search on Github reveals almost 2M individual repositories with that license. I'd wager that it's unlikely a majority of those would meet an include-in-a-distro's-package-manager level of polish.

I agree with your math and your assessment of what's available at Github and the like. Perhaps part of the problem is that people (including many developers) treat git repositories as app stores.

It seems unfair to complain that you're getting rough products when you're snatching them off the factory floor -- or out of the design room.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com