The Linux Desktop Is Studded with Grifters | Hacker News Reader

The Linux Desktop Is Studded with Grifters

thelinuxdesktop.blog

25 pointsnmcain14 comments

Invoking Occam's Razor, I think that most people who come into the open-source community, promise the moon, and open a Patreon/paypal, actually believe that they can make a difference where so many others failed. They've just vastly underestimated how hard it is to accomplish their promised goal. Then they get defensive. They use the newly-discovered complexity as an excuse to keep accepting donations, and put projects on hold without telling anyone, and move on to a new shiny area where they think they can make a difference. Sometimes they actually do eventually find a goal that they can accomplish, and deliver.

Why would anybody invest in a project that doesn’t exist? This sounds like a case of the Emperor’s Clothes.

Well in VC the answer is "the founders worked at Google" or "the founders went to Stanford."

Brock Turner went to Stanford as well.

The problem I think is largely due to lack of checks-and-balances. In the office you have investors who can apply pressure to management, who apply pressure to developers and hold them to a schedule; the lack of peer reviews (potentially) and transparency on the implementation are a problem too.

In the end, what is to stop the developers from walking away? They stand to lose nothing.

I think these platforms need to add legally binding contracts that will force developers to deliver or else they owe a large percentage of the money back (something like that).

Not really a linux story, its more "crowd funding doesn't work as an effective market in the presence of crooks"

And in a "bad money always chases out good money" crowdfunded projects seem mostly composed of noobs/crooks. Pros can't compete with infinite supply of people having no idea what they're doing or no intention to do anything, but willing to charge 10% less than the absolute minimum required for success, so pros can't participate in crowdfunding, the marketplace always becomes more toxic with time.

This doesn't seem like it has anything to do with "the linux desktop" but has to do with people taking money with no chance and/or intention of delivering. There aren't any examples given, can anyone think of a time that this happened?

> implement "better at vetting and rejecting these people"

> 2022: "The Linux Desktop Is Studded with Gatekeepers"

Err, any examples?

Right! Lots of finger pointing - but what it pointing at?

Pandora comes to mind, although it's not a desktop I guess lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console)

Yeah, keeping it too vague to be useful.

I kinda assume from the post that he's calling out people who roll a thinly-skinned version of Ubuntu, call it a new distro, and setup a new domain to pitch it with a Donate button. But these usually fail to gain much traction, so it's hard to discern whether he's calling out a particularly large or popular distro in particular, or if he's instead calling out contributors within certain communities.

I assume the author doesn’t want to make accusations for fear of liability. Which makes the piece kinda weak.

Yeah, this reads like a very long subtweet, but of what?

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