Elementary OS is imploding | Hacker News Reader

Elementary OS is imploding

lunduke.substack.com

386 pointsjosteink354 comments

Had the same issue with my first startup. 50:50 split, no agreement in place for the eventuality of a founder disagreement or one founder leaving the company. We were able to negotiate an acceptable solution but emotionally it was quite draining and it tarnished a good relationship/friendship. Also, in the end the company was not worth much, so in retrospect much quibble and stress about nothing.

I think the problem is that in the eyes of a founder their company is always worth a lot, as they tend to see the potential instead of the status quo. That said trying to leave a company that isn't profitable while keeping a 50 % stake and offloading the job of getting to profitability to your co-founder is pretty toxic. Asking to retain a small stake depending on the duration of your tenure seems reasonable though. For a bootstrapped company I think a 4-6 year vesting schedule is reasonable, though it highly depends on the situation of the company. Some businesses are still nowhere near profitable or stable after 4 years, so they won't survive one founder leaving with 50 % of the shares as it will make future investment highly unlikely (most VCs would never touch a company with a 50 % shareholder that has already left) and will destroy the morale of the remaining founders (as they will often think that half of their work will go towards someone who no longer contributes in a meaningful way to the company).

Having a shootout agreement in place I think is the best option: At any moment, a founder may wish to buy someone else's equity, or may wish to sell his own. At that moment, he proposes a transaction value. The counter-party has the choice to take either side of the transaction.

Example: Alice wants out. She proposes that Bob buys her shares for 50k. Bob may either accept the purchase, if he thinks the price is correct, or he must sell his own shares to Alice if he thinks the proposal is over-valued.

There are more details to this, like a horizon allowing for funds to be sought, the possibility of financing by the company or dealing with more than two partners, but this is the gist of it.

>Alice wants out. She proposes that Bob buys her shares for 50k. Bob may either accept the purchase, if he thinks the price is correct, or he must sell his own shares to Alice if he thinks the proposal is over-valued.

"I want out now, at $1,000,000 a share. What? You think my stake is only worth $50,000? Well then, sell me the company!"

"OK! Per our agreement, you owe me $1,000,000 per share."

> he must sell his own shares to Alice

at the price she proposed!

> The counter-party has the choice to take either side of the transaction.

"Ha ha, I tricked you into selling for only 2000% of your asking price!"

Huh, that's pretty ingenious.

So lets say that bob thinks that the proposal is over valued and sells his shares to Alice. Now Alice wants out, but is 50k poorer, and owns the entire company. How does it help the company to now be run by someone who no longer wants to work there, but has to because of debt?

That situation would imply Alice over-valued the company, and Bob was 100% right to sell his portion and walk away.

I get that Bob is happy with this outcome, but what about the company?

At the end of the day - most of what makes a company valuable (or even functional) is the people who are working there.

Sometimes novel IP has value, and sometimes the company has assets that are worth something, but this is relatively rare for software companies.

If you are relatively popular with your current users, your brand may also have some worth, and quite a few companies are happy to scoop up a brand, hollow it out, and retire it a few years later once it's no longer associated with anything worth while.

Otherwise... The company dies, because it was not profitable enough, and this is both normal and expected.

The company avoided a shareholder fight for shares. This is actually a defense mechanism for the company, not the founders.

It solves the basic problem of stabilizing the shareholder group. No more infighting.

Important to your point, this method makes it difficult to stray from the real valuation. If Alice really wants out, she does not value the shares as much as Bob. Her just valuation will be viewed as a good deal by Bob. The scenario you define probably will not happen. If it does happen, then by definition Alice actually valued staying with company.

I think this only works if both parties have similar financial situations? ie if the shares are "truly" worth 50K but one party can only come up with 10K, then an offer of 11K would allow the other to buy up the shares at a massive discount?

Perhaps an external investor could help? This way the amount wouldn’t reach 50k but I guess it wouldn’t drop to 11k either.

It's a very risky move. These agreements usually have a generous period for participants to seek funding (six months is typical). If the deal is economically advantageous (11k for a 50k share), and the problem is liquidity, the buying party can find an external investor willing to get in on the deal.

> That said trying to leave a company that isn't profitable while keeping a 50 % stake and offloading the job of getting to profitability to your co-founder is pretty toxic.

I partially disagree. The shares are his property, and his leaving should help things along as the remaining cofounder no longer has to argue. Also, trying to buy out a cofounder by giving them 50% of the startups current assets is absurd.

Where do you get 50% from? Thought he only wanted to retain 5%?

I think 50:50 equity was their personal example. But in the OP, the partner leaving seems to want total compensation that amounts to 50% of a very high valuation that may only be possible if the other founder keeps working at a discount and finds a new developer at an even worse deal just for the distribution to stay as relevant as today; unless they have very different luck or market conditions than in the past.

It's funny. I read the article and do not arrive at the same obvious/apparent conclusion the auther theirself does about Cassidy's position being reasonable, merely legal.

To me the reasonable thing to do is if you want to get out then get out, sell back your stake. If you want to stay in then stay in, work on the project full time or work out some new plan where all stakeholders agree to switch to day jobs and put this into hobby mode.

But if you just want to maintain a stake to collect rent, and demand cash that doesn't even exist, seriously F that guy. The only reason he's in the legal right to be this douchy is because they failed to write their 'pre-nup' properly, not because he's actually in the right and his position and expectations are reasonable.

I share your opinion. The second demand from the lawyer sounds like me when FOMO makes me lose my touch. Not at all reasonable and lacking the warmth of humanity.

When people buy stock in any company, they don't consider only the current value of the company as if it were to be liquidated today: they also consider future earnings, which they hope will increase the future value of their shares.

The same logic applies when selling.

If a co-founder sells back their stake, why should the current value of the company be the sole basis for pricing the sale? As with any other stock, owning shares represents a claim on a portion of the value created by the company's future earnings.

If someone is going to sell that claim, they are entitled to take that into account. That's not rent-seeking; it's compensation for giving up a claim on future earnings.

Of course, all of this assumes that Elementary OS has a bright future ahead of it as a business which will increase its earnings and value, which seems unlikely. The founders seem to be arguing over a company that is worth less than a new Camry. But still!

My guess is that he thinks that someone will buy the company when they become insolvent, and there's some cash to be made, but that he can't get it right now if the other founder isn't willing to sell.

Honestly - I have no idea if he's right, but I think the Pantheon DE is relatively pretty, and has some nice pieces. Combine with the fact that it's a fairly popular distro with new users... and I suspect there's at least a chance he's right (I'd still bet against it happening, though).

But for 23k... if I were in his shoes I'd probably also take that bet. I'd much rather have a chance at 100k (even if low odds) over 1.5 month's salary at the new gig.

Keep in mind that the author is not neutral here: Since he's expressed his position against trans people, and by doing that parted ways with Danielle Foré before (who previously identified as Daniel Foré and participated in his youtube videos), and also you can see that it refuses to use the actual name for Danielle; it's not surprising that he wants to reach a conclusion against her.

Enlightening. Thank you.

What does the trans issue even have to do with a partnership dispute, on the shareholding structure of their arrangement? Why does everything have to be a gender issue?

It refers to prejudice on the part of the article author. And not just assumed/general prejudice of a class but of this person in particular as well.

Do you have a source for that?

You seem to imply that a founder is somehow different from any other employee in a company that holds shares. Founders (and others) ARE treated differently if it's written into a contract.

Think about the common bay area tech compensation: employees get stock options and grants. Think of this as a stock grant: why would you be forced to sell because you decide to leave the company?

Hi Cassidy, I think I expressed my point directly enough without any implication.

>But Cass followed up later with an email that he didn’t want to give up his shares in the company.

Well, it's his property. Why should he give it up/away? That's also the risk you take when you go with someone else into business - that they simply can stop working and keep 50% (or whatever share) of the business and it's their good right to do so.

The risk was not having these things sorted out at the start. It’s pretty standard to have vesting schedules, even for founders. For exactly this kind of situation. Most Series A investors will stipulate such a requirement, and if there was already a vesting schedule it all resets as part of the investment.

Similarly it’s less common, but still not uncommon, to have provisions for leavers. Either some kind of prenegotiated basis to determine how you calculate fair value and buy back the share. Or I have seen something that was more like a reverse vesting in that the ownership expires X years after you leave.

The benefit of sorting all this stuff upfront isn’t just to avoid negotiating at the worst time when emotions are high. The game theory aspect of it requires you to balance not getting screwed with what seems fair if you’re the one that leaves.

Elementary isn’t new, I wouldn’t be surprised if the vesting schedule ran its course.

Yes reverse vesting (which is common) means that you start by owning your, say, 33% share from the start and each month you stay your quitting penalty reduces by 1%. So if you quit 1 month in you need to sell back 32% at basically no cost.

Since you own all the stock up front the founder participates fully in shareholder voting and you don't get taxed for receiving valuable stock later (although there might be issues with the actual reverse vesting agreement from a tax law standpoint as it is a form that ties your employment with benefits).

That's interesting, I never heard of reverse vesting. I thought you'd be liable for capital gains tax (since you're making a "gift to the company/cofounder", you'd have to use the real market value of the gift to compute CGT), but it seems that the tax rules have a special case defined exactly for this circumstance:

https://www.gov.uk/gift-holdover-relief

(of course, this depends on jurisdiction)

At the risk of making sweeping generalisations about tax law interpretations in multiple jurisdictions…

I’ve lived in numerous countries and they’ve all applied either one or both of the following to such a situation:

* the shares are deemed “at risk” because of the exit clause, and so are not yet taxable. In Australia _I think_ you need to explicitly declare that treatment in the first tax return that the event happens, and you’d be losing some of the benefit of the long term capital gains tax discount as a result. I’d need to double check with my accountant on the specifics, but I know he suggested such a thing at one point.

* the nominal value at the time is tiny fractions of a cent per share because the company has no assets or income. So you just take the tax hit, which ends up being something like $1.

I've seen a few pair of founders with great success have an agreement that one could at any point for any reason, decide to buy out the other party. Catch is that if you invoke that the other party can switch it around and demand that you accept that pay for your share.

It's crystal clear what and how, and you're not going to try and low ball it because you can be forced to sell for that yourself. I don't think it's perfect, but it is simple, self correcting and crystal clear.

> Catch is that if you invoke that the other party can switch it around and demand that you accept that pay for your share.

I'm kinda curious how the low-level details of that work out. Do you have some sort of 3rd-party service which temporarily holds one founder's offer and gives the other founder N days to make a decision? Or is there some other mechanism to prevent the founder initiating a buy out from backing out ("no you see, I wasn't actually serious about buying you out!").

The mechanism is triggered by one founder making a clear statement, usually in writing, that they want to trigger it. From that moment on, they are bound to it.

Apart from invoking it in writing, I think such manoeuvres go through a lawyer, which a court will usually accept them as stating the truth about when an offer was send and received. I'm also sure the clause have some text about how long the other founder has to answer and how long they have to come up with the money if they decide to switch it around.

This only works well if the parties have equal access to that kind of cash. Otherwise you might get into a situation where the richer founder can just decide to buy the other founder out at a price which is unfair but still beyond their cash means.

With enough time, the other founder can find outside investment.

That assumes that the founders have enough intimate knowledge of the other founders personal financial situation. They clearly risk becoming a victim of it them if the other founder can find enough money.

If a company is clearly worth more than the offer, finding outside investment or even traditional financing through the bank shouldn't pose that much of an issue.

It's called a 'Shotgun clause'.

> Well, it's his property.

I'm sure I'll be violently opposed here, but it seems like an awfully poor heuristic that creations are statically split at mint-time, as opposed to - say - the amount of labor put down over time, at least for a founding team.

For instance, let's say I and a friend created a company, and run it together for one year. She keeps her share, but stops contributing. I then keep working for 3 more years. In total, we created this thing over 5 person-years. A natural baseline split would be 20-80.

Obviously you can do more accurate heuristics based on skills, experience and other factors, and having salaried employees are outside of the equation.

In either case, I'd feel horrible in a hypothetical situation where my cofounder quits early with 50% and sit back and hope to cash in on future hard work from me. And not only that, but makes decisions over a company he's not operationally involved in.

As I mention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30612983, at the monetary level, I don't think this is a conflict over a 50% stake, but rather over the valuation of a 45% stake (at the end it would be a 95-5 split).

But in general yes, my impression is there are usually agreements in place to reduce an ex-founder's share of the company over time.

>I'm sure I'll be violently opposed here, but it seems like an awfully poor heuristic that creations are statically split at mint-time, as opposed to - say - the amount of labor put down over time, at least for a founding team.

That sounds reasonable. The problem is when people don't do the leg work to set up a framework to handle more complex share splits. Sans such a framework, the default is to split at mint time because that's how stakes have historically worked and the legal system should, in theory, minimize funny business possible when someone doesn't have a contract specifying any specific details.

The general outcome here is that the 'no contract' way of splitting shares is pretty bad, which seems in line with the no contract way of doing anything other transaction or business dealing. That way of doing business only works for small time transactions, say in the 2 or 3 digit range.

When you set up a start-up, you should now give ownership out that generously; give out options that vest over time, and place provisions in the shareholder agreement that specify what happens if one co-founder leaves.

Investors could minimize risk by providing templates for the various jurisdictions that show how this is done, for using lawyers to codify is going to cost more than the startup is initially worth, hence the common but entirely unnecessary infighting.

I use Elementary on one box and like it (only qualm to date: no window minimize button), whereas Ubuntu is nearly everywhere else. It would be nice if the community (= people closer to the founders that they know and trust) could step in and mediate.

It is correct, once you own shares they are yours forever, and unless a contract (shareholder agreement) says otherwise, they are yours to keep. It is NOT appropriate to want to participate in decisions after a full departure. In fact, that may also cause conflicts with one's next employment. Founders that leave may retain a purely passive stake. If they are smart, they understand that that can only be a small stake, otherwise the venture is at risk, because no investor wants much "dead wood" in the share pie.

The broader question is how to monetize a Linux distribution, I find that harder to think about than monetizing open source in general, which is already a little more challenging than selling proprietary software (you can sell services, but while that is easier than selling products, it only scales linearly with headcount => bad idea).

Guys, don't fight over 30k, in tech at your levels that's two monthly salaries!

> only qualm to date: no window minimize button

I have been a staunch advocate against minimizing windows, as I have seen people spend a significant share of their time doing it (instead of simply making visible the window they need).

Not a smart move for the parting founder though as keeping a 50 % stake of an unprofitable company will drastically reduce the chance of that company succeeding. The remaining founder won't be able to secure funding (no sane VC will touch a company with such a cap table) or offer those shares to new hires. Shares are a means to generate value, they should be handed out in exchange for taking risks (as the original founders), doing work (early hires / employees) or contributing money (investors). Having a large fraction of shares just "lie around" without contributing anything is pretty damning for a startup. Most likely outcome of those situations is that the remaining founder will abandon or sell the company.

Exactly - unless you are bitter and hate the company, why would you like to cause harm, in effect reduce the value of your stake?

Inactive, uninterested founders in general will only be a burden. Either you are engaged or you are not.

It appears the final offer was to keep a 5% stake, not a 50% stake, and then get the remaining 45% bought out for 100k (30k upfront, 70k over 10 years), and the disagreement was over whether that 45% was worth closer to 100k or 26k.

Basically as far as I can tell, as far as it pertains to shares, this conflict boils down purely to differing valuations of current shares (of course I'm sure on a personal level the conflict is much more complex).

> bought out for 100k

Which sounds kinda ridiculous to me given that the company had $52k in the bank and had been operating at a loss for an extended period of time.

Maybe. Being paid out 100k for 45% of any future exit of the company forever doesn't seem unreasonable on the face of things, even if the company only has 52k in the bank and has been operating at a loss for a long time. But that would depend on the specifics of what the company has in the pipeline. But if you think the company is likely to follow something like the following trajectory of net income then 100k for 45% doesn't seem all that unreasonable, even with time discounting.

Year 0: -10k

Year 1: 0k

Year 2: 10k

Year 3: 20k

Year 4: 40k

Year 5: 80k

Year 6: 100k

Year 7: 100k

Why would we expect a company that has been steadily reversing that trend to follow that trend?

Suddenly because a founder is leaving you expect them to start turning a profit again? That seems a little backwards.

Has that been true? I don't know what the company's financials have looked like year over year.

> Suddenly because a founder is leaving you expect them to start turning a profit again?

No, it's more a question of whether you think the company will ever turn a profit. That's probably the point of contention over how much the shares are worth: do you think Elementary OS will ever financially support a team? If not then you probably lean closer towards a 0 dollar valuation (or in this event 26k). If you do then you probably lean closer to a 100k valuation.

Well the tweets said sales fell and haven't recovered since COVID, which has been going on for two years now.

But regardless, the value of the shares are... whatever their value is now. It doesn't matter what they might be worth in 10 years if their current value is ~zero and a founder wants to divest them now.

> It doesn't matter what they might be worth in 10 years if their current value is ~zero and a founder wants to divest them now.

But the current value of shares is intimately tied to what their expected future value is. Indeed in the absence of an acquisition or IPO this is the only way to determine the current value of shares. And if different people disagree on their expected future value, they will disagree on their current value.

From the looks of it they never turned a reliable profit to pay two developers. They received a one time anonymous donation in 2018[1], that led to the second developer and looks like they were averaging about 16K a year then.

In general, I think what is wrong with this argument is that they are both in the wrong. They founded a company that should have been a 501c and now they are talking about its value as an asset based on the willingness of people to make donations to enable developers to work on a project.

These kinds of cream on the top FOSS projects run as companies are largely relying on naive good will of people who want to fund the best project to adapt open source to them rather than the best portion of open source for them.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_OS

well, they'll basically lose half the costs immediately, since they'll stop paying the second developer's salary. If that's 16k and they lost 10k last year, this year they can be in the black if they don't dip further.

This said, I reckon the real issue is that the guy wants 50/60k from the shares, so the lawyer went "we'll ask for 100k and negotiate"... but on the other side they probably think 26k was already a compromise, and aren't willing to budge further.

Yes, if we consider your completely imaginary numbers that have no basis in reality or even basic reasonableness then sure, it makes perfect sense.

Those numbers are made up sure, but they're meant to demonstrate that a 26k valuation of 45% of your company after 10+ years in business means you effectively believe your company will never be able to support more than one employee (presumably the founder themselves), by contrasting with how modest even a 100k valuation means you think the future of the company will be. It's fine to believe Elementary OS will live on in perpetuity as a single person free lance project, but is a pretty stark contrast with where I think Elementary OS wants to go and means that one of the co-founders presumably should come out and say Elementary OS will never be a company, but rather a one-person free lance project.

And I can easily understand how that would rub the other cofounder the wrong way ("Oh so you believe that Elementary OS will eventually be able to hire a team down the road but you're offering me a price that indicates the opposite, even after accounting for uncertainty? Sounds like you're intentionally low-balling me here after 10 years of hard work together.") Of course from the other co-founder's point of view 70k of debt hanging over one's head is not a fun prospect either. But nothing at first glance here, without additional details, jumps out as me as brazenly unreasonable from either side.

> Well, it's his property. Why should he give it up/away?

Legally sure but thinking more pragmatically the company is already struggling financially, why not take the money they offer and leave on good terms?

The friendship/business contacts are probably worth more than the company shares. And if the company rebounds and you miss out, well that is life. You still have been founder of a great company and that will open many future doors.

In German we would say that the smarter one compromises. Arguing only leads to both sides loosing.

> Arguing only leads to both sides loosing.

Indeed. At least the lawyers seem to be winning.

It’s open source right? Shut down the company (or stop working on it, that’s what the other founder is doing, value will quickly plummet to zero). Set up a new company with you as the only owner, then proceed where you left off.

Agreed. This is just silly. There is either a buy/sell agreement or there is not. If there is not, you can’t force your solution on the other founder.

In fact you can. With no other formal agreement in place, any cooperative venture is an equally-owned "general partnership", and no partner can legally do anything to diminish another's ownership. And all business debts, however they are incurred, are shared equally too.

Source: been there, twice. Now I keep a boilerplate partnership agreement form URL bookmarked on my phone...

Agreed. Ownership and employment are two very different things. There isn't any reason that he couldn't keep the shares.

You don't have to set up a business with a conventional capitalist ownership structure. You could make it a co-operative instead.

This is some kindergarten playground “I’m going to take my toys”-level pettiness. Sure, they’re allowed to do this, but _everyone_ hates them.

ElementaryOS is leaving a lot of money on the table.

The reason is that they have an established user base, and there is an app store, which is very curated.

People would be more than willing to pay for apps on that app store.

Not so many developers are willing, though. The thing is, to publish on the app store, the source code must be publicly available on for instance, github.

If they allowed app developers to sell truly commercial software, ElementaryOS could be a self growing machine, and they could give away the OS for "free" and keep the OS open source.

Maybe it's not as "pure" as what they are doing now, but on the other hand they could reach so many more people if they had more monetary resources.

elementary is already moving in the right direction by trying to combine flatpak and AppCenter (=payments) -> https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-appcenter-flatpak/

From there it's not a huge jump to allow flatpaks that are closed source and/or not written with GTK, certainly more realistic than with non-sandboxed DEBs.

But as a former elementary user and micro-contributor, I also think that the App Store model has been a disaster for elementary OS. It means that developers who are perfectly capable of fixing the buggy stock apps are incentivized to instead start their own app and (fail to, presumably) get paid for it. Random example from a very prolific developer in the golden age of eOS 5:

https://appcenter.elementary.io/com.github.artemanufrij.play...

Now this app has been abandoned, and instead of taking over this developer's personal app, the next person who wants to write a music player will start another one. And so on.

If they got decently paid, by allowing proprietary apps, one of the competing apps could stick around by virtue of actually making money.

The ElementaryOS company would also get more cash, and could, (like Apple!) improve a core set of apps.

A "kernel" of good quality Linux apps could also spread to other distributions, and hopefully slowly coalesce around GTK and "ElementaryOS" style GUI as a de-facto standard. (Since the other distros are more accepting of jumbled GUI styles anyway, why not make your app on ElementaryOS first, and distribute that version on the other Linux versions, too.)

Anyway, the hurdle is not technical - flatpaks or no flatpaks. The hurdle is strategy and ideology.

I think that technical hurdles absolutely matter, even more so at the current scale of elementary. And offering apps that are neither sandboxed nor auditable sounds like a PR disaster waiting to happen once someone steals Bitcoin wallets.

Thankfully, the kernel of apps that work across distributions is slowly coming together over at flathub, which is planning to add payment support: https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/680

Even the KDE-based Steam Deck, on the opposite end of every spectrum from elementary, embraces flatpak (and flathub).

It's exactly the piece of the puzzle that would have enabled what you suggest: write elementary-flavored apps, sell them everywhere. Given that elementary has already added the Sideload app, I'm not sure if they're as ideological about GTK FOSS purity as it sometimes seems.

They are giving OS for free, no?

Yeah, keep doing it, I meant. My mind was racing, but I see parallels to how Apple "gives away" the OS (really bundles), so MacOS does not have an apparent cost to end users.

ElementaryOS could similarly do that while be the place to gather high quality graphical linux applications. And not only high quality, UX consistent.

Such a shame if it fell down this close to success.

It's really, really hard to start a 2-sided market. But it's almost like Elementary is activelly avoiding a run-away success.

In a way it's like they are naturally a SAAS (curated app store) but they try very very hard to sell a product.

If they do what you suggest, how will they make enough money to survive? Especially when other distros could just copy their features and give them away for free.

They would be in no worse position they are now, the difference is that third party app developers could make money on their platform. For Elementary, it would mean the same or more cash. Likely more.

I don't think it's apparent how little money ElementaryOS needs to thrive as a SAAS style business. They only need a few thousand sales a month through the app store to make a HUGE difference to their bottom line.

I’ve advocated for specialisation elsewhere ITT.

Element OS could choose a sector of power users and cater to them with custom features.

Getting Linux desktop users to pay for distros or apps has always been a very tough sell.

Linux users typically demand everything be free. Not a lot of success with commercial software, especially aimed at the consumer.

In the early days of Elementary OS, I wanted to get involved and help contribute, but even then it was evident that these two were deeply dysfunctional human beings. They generally got along, but they both seemed to think of themselves as the next coming of Steve Jobs. This (and the scary low quality of the source code) put me off of elementaryOS entirely.

I never looked in the source code, but had the same feeling about the founders back then.

To be frank, Danielle is delusional. Someone who has worked on a company for ~10 years absolutely should be able to profit from a future sale of the company.

It seems the most fair thing would be to simply issue new stock grants with a vesting schedule. If the company sold tomorrow they'd still (rightfully) split it evenly but over time Cassidy's shares would be diluted.

The antiquated word you are looking for is: pension.

Well, when that person didn't want to reverse the deal (pay 26k and get 100% of the company), that kinda tells that there is no way 45% of the company is worth a 100k.

Yeah if the deleted tweets are true then that part sort of reveals how cold and ruthless the move is. I mean it's "just business" so technically nobody should expect anything less. But still I bet it feels like a real gut punch to have to deal with a former friend or colleague as if they're an adversary like this.

I... I think I agree. Their tacit collusion with GNOMEs harmful policy push that started ~2 years ago burned a lot of goodwill, and the lack of meaningful changes started to go far beyond whay you'd expect for a minimalist operating system. At this point, I think they're in the same delusional mindset as the GNOME foundation, eg.: "our users don't know what's best for them!"

It's very frustrating to watch desktop Linux head down this path, and it's started to severely limit the amount of software I can comfortably use on my desktop. Unless sonething changes, I seriously worry for the future of similar Linux projects that fight for control and refuse to collaborate meaningfully.

> At this point, I think they're in the same delusional mindset as the GNOME foundation, eg.: "our users don't know what's best for them!"

To be fair, I think they're trying to emulate Apple's behavior in this regard which ended up actually working very well for them. Not that I necessarily agree with that decision, I hate Apple for it, but I can't really blame them either when Apple has created what's considered the peak of UX these days using this mindset.

Apple's mindset works because they reap virtually unlimited margins off the software other people make. FOSS is diametrically opposed to that mindset.

I dunno. I’ve been using apple for years and wanted a linux that is a bit similar wrt multiple desktops in particular the three-finger swipe between desktops. Elementary OS has that, and it’s also vaguely pretty. At least that was my impression of the live cd. But it took me forever to set it up properly. It’s full of bundled software which u don’t need. And it’s even more opinionated than apple, while being less polished.

What bugs me, after having spent several days to get this to work, is that I realised that they made the decision that software isn’t allowed to use systray icons. So software like the Dropbox client don’t work out of the box, because they can’t be accessed via gui. There’s oodles of people who complain about this, and the elementary os answer was something like “this (systray) api was deprecated years ago”, like it’s our own fault we rely on software that needs them.

> It's very frustrating to watch desktop Linux head down this path, and it's started to severely limit the amount of software I can comfortably use on my desktop.

I agree. At the heart of it, this is what has led to me begin to shift away from Linux and to BSD.

And this is a textbook example of why you create a shareholder agreement when you start a company with other people.

Much easier to come up with equitable terms when nobody has done any work and the company isn’t worth anything yet.

All else aside, elementaryOS has (had?) an awful lot of promise. Linux desktop environments and graphical applications are often wildly inconsistent and not attractive to look at. It has been nice to watch the development of a desktop that not only tries to looks the part but also has relatively few surprises in real use. It's a shame that another great open source project will suffer due to human differences.

Reading this on ElementaryOS 6.1, paid for and all. After RedHat (the non-enterprise RedHat that is), Debian, Arch, this ElementaryOS was such a breath of fresh air.

I really don't want to go back to XFCE or Gnome. I hope that somehow they still figure it out. :-/

> Linux desktop environments and graphical applications are often wildly inconsistent and not attractive to look at.

Totally false.

I have used KDE Neon, Kubuntu, and Pop OS. All of them are very nice to look at and have a consistent approach towards aesthetics.

Elementary's "attractiveness" always felt skin-deep to me, triggering some uncanny valley effects more than enjoyment.

Even the basic premise that what people like about Apple is adequately described by "attractive to look at" shows the error in thinking.

I don't think that's the basic premise. elementary is not just a GTK theme, they have their own set of apps (for better or for worse) which follow their HIG, they are rewriting productivity apps to use the EDS backend throughout the system, they are trying to improve gesture support everywhere... It feels a lot like what made OS X so great about a decade ago.

Having switched from elementaryOS to Fedora 35 I am much happier with the latter. I think elementaryOS did some interesting things and made it clear some things needed to be better supported by gnome - one to one gestures, accent hinted buttons, light/dark theme standardization - but once these things got adopted into stock Gnome there aren't many reasons left to run elementaryOS. App Center is atrocious in so many ways whereas Gnome Software just works now and Flathub works very well and I don't see what value any of the elementaryOS stuff brings any more.

I really fear for startups and OSS these days. The co-founders are arguing about 30k's worth of shares. The reality is that with their talent they could earn that *per month* at FAANG.

Who is going to build the next generation of tech, if everyone is sitting at cushy remote jobs building ad-tech?

OSS founder here! (At robusta.dev - kubernetes stuff)

Funding is very good these days for OSS startups, especially related to kubernetes and cloud.

That said, I wouldn't recommend that anyone become a founder for the cash. It's just not worth the stress.

The thrill of inventing something, finding product market fit, building a team and product from zero, working on the GTM... Worth everything I own and more. Would pay to do it.

"Would pay to do it."

If you can afford to work for free or even paying for the privilege to work, than this is very good for you, but not helpful for anyone who needs to make a living first.

But thanks for providing a counter example, that there is indeed money in OSS.

Sorry, was hyperbole. I have to pay bills like everyone else and am getting married tomorrow. I just meant that I enjoy it.

I see ;)

Congratulations for tomorrow and all the best!

Thank you!

vc funding is a pattern by which autonomous entities made out of money (better known as investment funds) take over your property and wind up controlling "your" (but really their) company

but I'm just paranoid

I think it will be self-correcting since those cushy jobs pay well enough to let you quit while being financially secure, so they need to pay even more to keep people, compounding the situation.

If you want to build innovative things or contribute to society, the best strategy right now seems to be dividing your time between (1) making a lot of money and (2) making no money.

That's what I've been doing for a few years, doing about 6 months freelancing followed by a year of personal projects. If I were to go back in time it may have made more sense to spend 3-4 years at a FAANG then 10 years independent, but I also worry it may have changed my perspective.

I thought about this, but then thought why would I spend my savings doing the same thing I do at work only to be making no money and have a wave of whinging users furious I didn’t fix their pet bug. When I could instead spend that time sitting on a beach sipping martini’s.

I think it’s about makers gonna make mindset. If you like building things you spent all time building things. Sipping martini’s may be fun for the first week.

That's fine in a truly affluent laissez-faire society that we've enjoyed through the 80s and 90s and some of this century.

But here's what might happen when the good will and good faith of free labour that supports the machine is pushed too far. A little fictional retelling of "The Golden Goose" for our time [1]

[1] http://techrights.org/2022/01/21/peak-code-before-the-wars/

but it's not about making cool new things that everybody is interested on

by this point the issue is maintaining boring old stuff everybody depends on

maybe that's what happens to most (google for example), from being a cool new research program in search and document analysis to just another company trying to make money to keep up

The makers who are going to make are making now, not making money at Facebook so they can later make. I have no idea if I'm going to die tomorrow and I'm not going to do so as a Facebook employee dreaming of the day I'm not.

Getting paid a lot to sit behind a big desk on week days and occasionally write C++ in order to support my own venture eventually became untenable. I couldn’t bring myself to take the day job seriously: it’s useless corporate shit that does nothing but make the world a worse place, and it took time and attention away from making my own customers happy.

Edit: the worst of it was that because I stopped caring about office politics, I ruthlessly called out process problems, and accumulated ridiculous amounts of responsibility far beyond my job description. I hope everything went OK after I stopped showing up.

Exactly. Given unlimited budget of both time and money, how would I amuse myself with it?

Buy a big house. Ok then what? Sit on my couch in my big house? What about the 2nd hour?

Sure I'd travel and consume amusements like ziplining in the jungle or something and seeing plays and concerts.

Ok but then what?

What I would do is buy a big workshop and fill it with all kinds of tools in all kinds of different disciplines, from woodworking to 3d printing to welding to machining to chemistry to glassworking to software to electronics... (ok I lack imagination because in fact my garage, basement, guest room, and a rented 10x20 self storage unit are already stuffed to the gills with those exact things, plus guitars and aquarium stuff and cycling stuf...) and not just to look at them but to play with them.

That IS my maitai on the beach.

The beach is very enjoyable, and I do enjoy it, but it is not interesting.

The users who get my stuff for free don't matter at all. I owe them nothing. If I care about a project or a project's reception or usefulness or quality, then I care about it. The users don't extract unwilling care out of me, I have to already care on my own, which means adressing bugs or features is just more of the same work I WANTED to do just like the developing in the first place.

It's totally backwards to think of the users as some kind of burden you hate.

I mean, let's say you do hate that burden: ok then just don't release any of the stuff you built. But then what was the point in that? Yes you can't help building stuff and it was engaging and interesting to build, and you chose to do it when you had the choice to do anything you wanted... but still, part of what makes something worth doing is that it's at least theoretically not totally pointless. Even if in reality your github gains no real audience, it's good enough that it's at least published and out there and could possibly be found interesting or useful by someone else sometime. The mere possibility is enough. But to me unreleased code is a dead end. It's maybe good for exercise but what good is the exercise if not to eventually use the strength for something somewhere that is something other than exercise?

So you build and publish and so what if some users whinge?

> why would I spend my savings doing the same thing I do at work

If you are spending your time at work exactly the same way you would spend your freetime then yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

Many of the jobs that pay well don't make you do things that are fun though, but more things the business needs in order to make more profit. Since it is like that for most software developers, I think that's the perspective that akvadrako has as well.

With that perspective, then it makes sense to work (on unfun work) for X amount of years in order to afford spending Y amount of years on actually fun work.

History shows that programmers tend to build more useful and groundbreaking work when there is no deadlines and it's for their own fun as well.

I have played around with elementary OS for a bit, and even though it was "coding like at work", it was really refreshing to see how much elementary's tiny team has already achieved. At the MegaCorp day job, every new button requires a meeting marathon only to fail in unforeseen ways.

Martinis on a beach and hobby coding are also compatible.

> every new button requires a meeting marathon only to fail in unforeseen ways.

I think this is a function of user base size, not so much profit or company size.

In my experience it’s definitely about company size / stakeholder count rather than user base. You don’t need a bunch of people to sign off if there aren’t a bunch of people.

It's entirely about company size and profit. Small companies can't afford to have their limited staff wasting time on bullshit. Big companies tolerate or even encourage it, for various reasons.

> If you want to build innovative things or contribute to society, the best strategy right now seems to be dividing your time between (1) making a lot of money and (2) making no money.

I am figting for the bad guys in my work time and for the good guys in my frer time?

That's basically the plot of Cory Doctorow's recent novel, "Attack Surface".

To me, ad tech isn't inherently bad, although some uses of it definitely are... the main problem with it is, it makes way too much money. From this standpoint, taking these companies' excess cash and putting it to better use seems like the best possible thing an individual could do, if they have the skills.

Ad tech is absolutely inherently bad, and it is not a fixable problem.

Just off the top of my head, there are multiple unsolvable problems with the market. There are principal-agent problems between ad brokers and both buyers and sellers [0],[1] and attribution is nearly impossible [2] - which leads to increasingly invasive surveillance tools being deployed. Then there's the issue of asymmetric information: most consumers have no idea what information is being collected about them, or even by whom. Just outside the market, there is also the "clicks and attention == revenue" externality that is extremely costly to society. Every single ad tech company is either exploiting these problems in the market to generate outsized profits, or selling increasingly invasive surveillance technology to try to "solve" them.

The problem isn't any individual bad actor's behavior - it's the entire structure of the digital advertising market. There is no solution, because even assuming everyone is acting in good faith and in their best interests you'll see the exact same devolution to "What if we just find ways watch everything everyone does and track everything they do on and off their computers all the time? That's both profitable and clears up a lot of the market failures. Let's do that!"

[0] https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20CF... (PDF)

[1] https://checkmyads.org/branded/

[2] https://instapage.com/blog/personalized-advertising-and-attr...

Those are all good points. You certainly seem more informed about it than me.

Some of these points seem to apply to traditional advertising as well, although arguably traditional advertising isn't great either. Attribution is an eternal ad industry problem. Principal-agent issues exist too, but might be worse now, with the layers of tech abstraction that only the "agents" understand and manipulate. OTOH attribution is easy for agents to manipulate even in low-tech contexts.

The relentless digital surveillance is new, and yeah, pretty awful, and hopefully we see it getting shut down by moves in consumer tech, e.g. that privacy thing Apple did that pissed FB off (I don't recall exactly what it was).

I think the basic idea behind Google AdWords is pretty neat, although now they're trying to extract maximum value by clogging pages with ads and reducing the distinction between ads and organic search results.

A large part of modern ad tech involves surveillance capitalism with basically no real oversight.

If we were just talking about paid distribution of memes to get people to drink beer and take vacations, I would have less of a concern.

You're not taking excess cash, you're providing them value (in the form of engineering expertise) in excess of the value you extract as a salary. That's the whole reason companies hire employees!

Unless you're advocating for getting hired in adtech and then sabotaging their projects from within while collecting a salary, but I don't think that's ethical, legal, or what you're describing...

At this point the bad guys are the good guys. React, Kubernetes, and Go are A) paid for by B) really popular because of Facebook and Google. The only question I have is if the bad guys will stop being the good guys (aka funding OSS ).

Haven't looked into Go too deeply, but React and Kubernetes are toxic technologies. Their strategic purpose is to disempower indie devs and small enterprises, who have no say in what the "new normal" is.

>React and Kubernetes are toxic technologies. Their strategic purpose is to disempower indie devs

Wut? ...You're ...gonna need to defend that assertion. Just because BigCo's tooling is fit for BigCo's purpose does not mean they set out to harm smaller devs.

Perhaps it's not their purpose, but it is their effect.

You don't turn a bicycle for the mind into a monorail for the soul without doing some serious, respectable engineering, of the kind you and I will probably never be let anywhere near.

> You don't turn a bicycle for the mind into a monorail for the soul without doing some serious, respectable engineering

I'm putting this on a poster and hanging it on my wall. Thank you.

Pics or it didn't happen.

Devs never had a say in what the new normal is except what they choose to use.

I'm not a fan of React and use svelte. But I think k8s is way better than non-k8s, so I use it for client work.

at least in the US that's a lot harder because the health insurance for my family of 5 is through the roof. even if i saved a whole lot of money it would be burned through easily by health care costs in months.

health care is more expensive for my family than my property taxes + mortgage

Same here, same family size. Bad insurance is more expensive than property tax + mortgage.

This always have been the case, I think. If not with IT then with other jobs in the world. Teachers and healthcare workers have been criminally underpaid, and yet they don't all quit. Which really sucks but shows that the issue is not that simple.

Oh. It is that simple. Start with stomaching the thought that if they were quitting, they wouldn't be paid slave wages :)

J. Peterson had a very very good talk about holding your ground and why some people fail at it.

Link to the talk?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbgJiprNoM8

People are motivated by more than just money.

That's exactly the point I wanted to make. Which is why there's no need to fear for OSS - there will be plenty to develop it anyways.

No offense, but it's hard to monetize FOSS operating systems. I've yet to see a scalable business model. All FOSS OS's rely on either donations or consulting/support for revenue. There's just no money to be made there, unless someone comes up with something innovative.

RedHat?

My impression is that RedHat is basically the only company to pull off the open source + paid support model. All other open source companies I know of either use open core or paid hosting.

Are there are any other companies like RedHat successfully thriving off just paid support? If so which ones? If not why not?

SUSE is another one I'm aware of. Some projects also fund themselves off support, I believe cURL does it.

Right I totally forgot about SUSE.

But I'm not really counting cURL because that's just one person right? The challenges faced by essentially a 1-person freelancer are quite different than a larger company. Or is cURL now a whole company at this point? EDIT: I see you mean this as a separate category of just "projects."

The curl guy has joined a company. https://curl.se/support.html

Arguably that's mostly cuz SAP strongly recommends SuSE

Never seen a real use case for it outside of the ERP arena, and RHEL / CentOS can do everything else.

Ubuntu / Canonical is trying but heard the company is kind of a mess.

PostgreSQL has a number of companies providing support, the db is free and open source. Ray is offered for free, Anyscale provides support. Quansight offers qhub for free and provides support. Those are just a few off the top of my head. Disclaimer: I work at Quansight and contribute to ray.

Anyscale seems to follow the paid hosting (open source product + paid in-house SaaS offering) strategy though? Similarly the majority of the companies listed at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/ either provide paid hosting or some version of open core (proprietary add-ons/tools) in addition to support, or else seem to be general DB consultancies that include Postgres as one of their supported products, although it does look like there are a few small teams that focus exclusively on Postgres consulting.

Quansight is a fascinating example! Are you allowed to share roughly what ratio of revenue comes from the support side and what ratio comes from the venture fund?

I don’t really know, sorry. There are a lot of moving pieces as the company grows (we are hiring) and the interplay between the pure consulting, open source work, growing the Venture fund is dynamic.

What's wrong with paid hosting? For the people who do pay for software (essentially commercial entities), the management and support are as important (if not more) than the software itself. The code being open-source is actually a great advantage because it alleviates concerns around lock-in and vendor going under (If e.g. AWS's RDS is for some reason no longer available to us, I can still run Postgresql myself, at least until I find an alternative).

> What's wrong with paid hosting?

Oh nothing wrong. I'm just on a fact-finding mission on seeing whether any other companies have successfully followed the consulting/support contract model vs paid hosting or open core (because this has rather significant repercussions on what kind of products lend themselves well to a given business model, e.g. a desktop app is not going to work well for paid hosting).

Suse, EnterpriseDB, Canonical, Hashicorp and and and...but a Linux-distro for the desktop with the sustainability of two "fighting" friends......

IIRC EnterpriseDB mainly makes it money from paid hosting and I think Hashicorp makes its money from a combo of paid hosting and open core (i.e. it has other proprietary tools and add-ons). SUSE is a good example, but I'm not as sure about Canonical. Wasn't it the case that Canonical is actually operating at a loss and has been for a while? Maybe that's changed?

Canonical had a $20 million operating profit in 2020.

Oh interesting. But digging into that it looks like it's coming from adding open core and previous to that they were losing money? (Ubuntu Pro + Ubuntu Advantage providing auxiliary proprietary? tools)

But then you can argue that RedHat made also money with Openshift no?

>EnterpriseDB mainly makes it money from paid hosting

Not sure if that's true.

> But then you can argue that RedHat made also money with Openshift no?

Yeah but RedHat's (and I guess SUSE?) miracle is that they were still very profitable before Openshift.

> Not sure if that's true.

Well hopefully someone from EnterpriseDB can chime in!

The thing is if you do pull off the open source + paid support model where does that leave you? Doing technical support? I suspect most of us would prefer to spend our time creating rather than answering emails and phone calls.

It feels like we have the cart before the horse, we start by deciding we want to do open source then try and squeeze the business model into it. We would be better starting with the business and customers then deciding whether open source helps or hinders.

Proxmox projects (Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup, Proxmox Mail Gateway) are also 100% fully open source and gets the revenue through enterprise support. Works fine for us.

>Works fine for us.

Because proxmox makes phenomenal products.

My understanding is that Busybox and buildroot are largely maintained by individual consultants which is pretty similar (although there's no larger company around them.)

The company bought by IBM recently?

I mean, they got a nice chunk of change, but there's no guarantee that any of their original culture will still be in place 10 years from now.

Always thought that Aesprite were onto something good. Assuming I've got this right, the source code is out there and free, but you need to pay for the compiled binaries. Most people can't be bothered doing the latter, so paying a bit for it is worthwhile

I've seen the pay-for-binaries model in a few places. Not sure if it's scalable since someone can write a build script and share it with the community.

It depends -- with a community build script, you're relying on (and trusting!) a third party to maintain it and not do anything malicious. Much easier to pay a few bucks for first party binaries. At least in my eyes.

This is how every distro repo works and likely where you would get that binary from.

In Windows, people willingly download shady binary from piracy sites all the time to avoid paying for software.

I think you underestimate the incentive of free (beer) stuffs.

Note that Aseprite is source-available but not FOSS, the license explicitly forbids redistribution. It used to be FOSS at the past though.

I'd be worried about perverse incentives. The company is now incentivized to make the build process more difficult, or at least not incentivized to try to make the build process easier for end users, which goes against the point of open source.

> I'd be worried about perverse incentives. The company is now incentivized to make the build process more difficult, or at least not incentivized to try to make the build process easier for end users, which goes against the point of open source.

Open Source doesn't imply anything on the code. It assumes to benefit from a wide range of people (and outsiders views). Open Source projects, which would reject PRs on improving the build process will suffer contributions in the long run, risking their acceptance in the community. It should aid itself. At least this is the philosophy I proclaim myself :)

> Open Source doesn't imply anything on the code.

No, but if we imagine the incentive taken to the extreme, where you have an arcane build process that makes it essentially impossible for any person who's not on the original team to build the software, then the software devolves to effectively just a source-available project, since the users have no way of actually building their own versions, which also precludes being able to make any modifications even on their own forks.

I guess the major difference vs truly only source-available is that you can still copy and paste chunks of code to use in other projects?

I am struggling to think of any open source project of any size beyond small NPM packages that I've experienced that do not have an arcane build system. At least all of the ones I've encountered have been incredibly obtuse, to the point that I've mostly just given up. Anything Mozilla, Google, or Facebook writes. Actually, come to think of it, the only open source projects of non-trivial size I've ever been able to build without dedicating several weeks of time to have been from Microsoft.

If I think about the software that I use on a regular basis that I've built from scratch at least once, quite a few of them are fairly straightforward and basically just the two lines I indicated. Just off the top of my head all of these were just those two lines (download build tool then run the install step):

1. Kubernetes

2. git-annex

3. The new generation of replacements for various core command tools (e.g. ripgrep, fd, etc.)

EDIT:

> several weeks of time

Out of curiosity, what projects were those that took several weeks? My presumption is probably very GUI heavy ones?

I don’t know about weeks, but I remember LibreOffice, Firefox, and Clang all having their own ad hoc build systems requiring some amount of custom configuration.

Debezium is also very Byzantine, or maybe it’s just that I don’t understand maven.

I've built a bunch of software from source myself and pretty much all of it is

    ./configure [options]
    make
    make install

...or the closest equivalent (e.g. some use meson or cmake).

To be fair, these steps can go wrong when the project doesn't make clear that there are a lot of implicit dependencies for the configure step to even work (and then make can sometimes break if those implicit dependencies aren't the expected version).

But to your point, there are a lot of projects for which those steps work just fine.

Sure and in fact it did happen with one of the software i was trying to build, but the (first) error is usually along the lines of "cannot open include file foobarlib.h" - so i can search for that library (and many package managers let you search for the header files directly) or "this struct doesn't have that field" (common with -IIRC- libjpeg that at some point made some structs opaque). The latter is a bit more work (fixing the code) but it is also very rare.

Indeed which is why I like rust so much. The best thing they did was to make every program statically linked, so the build process succeeds 99% of the time. The only time I’ve had it fail for me really is when a project depends on OpenSSL and I don’t have it configured to it’s liking. Those time bring me back to the “make” days when I’d have to spend an afternoon installing some tool with all its dependencies, and even then sometimes I’d sometimes give up in frustration.

The problem with static linking is that if all you have is a binary (e.g. closed source program) you do not get any new fixes or features from the libraries you depend on.

For example many early 2000s games that used SDL 1.x can be made to work on modern Linux simply by removing the SDL so file they were bundled with and let them use the one the system provides (most common issue would be audio but also mode setting or full screen support).

This isn't a thing only on Linux btw, SDL games that have an old DLL can also have issues on Windows (in fact a game of mine was like that :-P) but be made to work by simply replacing the DLL with a newer one.

That’s surely a problem but I try to avoid closed source software for this very reason. Obviously there are a million and one ways closed source software can leave you high and dry, and static linking is one of those but really I think the operative word driving the sadness here is “closed” rather than “static”.

This can be an issue with open source programs as well from a practical perspective. For example let's say i modified Gtk to use a sane file dialog - i'd rather replace the system installed shared object once and have everything use it rather than recompile everything that uses Gtk.

apt source hello

apt build-dep hello

dpkg-buildpackage ...

https://wiki.debian.org/BuildingTutorial#Building_the_source...

https://ostechnix.com/how-to-build-debian-packages-from-sour...

https://buildd.debian.org/

https://buildd.debian.org/stats/

...all hail distribution package maintainers!

There's a little more to it (deb-src into /etc/apt/sources.list), but it's super-instructive to do it on something like 'busybox' and be able to make legitimate changes to something like 'ls' ... or do it to 'coreutils' and make modifications to the "real ls".

Although the "speed-bump" to being able to build packages for the first time is a bit rough, the benefit is that the documentation is outstanding and the process is pretty seamless for most/all packages, regardless of complexity.

The docs and tools are written by engineers and maintainers for people just like you... an independent consumer/programmer, sitting at their computer, trying to (re-) build a package to add a feature or fix a bug.

The other benefit is that the process is relatively consistent across literally thousands of packages and there's a lot of docs + tools +features to handle almost any scenario that Debian (Ubuntu) supports. If you learn it for one use case, your investment pays dividends across all other packaged software.

Have you tried building any open source projects? It's not exactly a good landscape to begin with.

It depends on the ecosystem (especially for tools without GUIs, I've found it usually is just two lines at the terminal: one to install the build tool for a given ecosystem and then the other to run it), but sure there are plenty of open source projects which are difficult to build from scratch. However, for most of them this is an acknowledged shortcoming that they try to fix when given the time and resources. It might be a much different world if there was a financial incentive to magnify that shortcoming.

FOSS can’t really work like this because anyone is free to compile it and stick it in a flatpak or on the distro repos. It only really works for something like iOS where there is only one store.

This business model relies on the build tooling being arse, though.

git clone && npm run build is not worth $20 to most people.

I'm not sure Aseprite is an example to follow - just as they made this license change, a fork of the previous license - LibreSprite - has popped up. It lacks a lot of the features and bugfixes of Aseprite, but hey it's free, and many open source enthusiasts view it as the morally superior version.

This simultaneously shows the weakness of the open-source development model - a non-monetizable passion project can rarely match the quality of something with full-time devs behind it, and probably isn't something that the Aseprite dev(s) are happy about - it sucks to compete against your own product sold for $0.

I found nabu casa, the maker of homeassistant a good approach. You can pay 5 bucks/month to have a no-worry about cloud access to your instance.

Cloud access sounds like an anti-feature to me.

It sounds like an excellent feature to me. I’d pay for that.

I’d say they’re charging too little.

They upped their pricing to 6.5 USD last month.

Aside from the friction-less remote access they also provide friction-less Google/Alexa integration.

It's documented how to set this up yourself if you don't wanna pay them to manage it for you too.

> It's documented how to set this up yourself if you don't wanna pay them to manage it for you too.

That right there is the best way to go. Everything in the open, everything can be self-hosted, but you can pay for the convenience of someone else doing it.

I’d normally have done that myself. But considering that having them handle it also funds Home Assistant development, it was actually pretty easy to decide for.

Their solution is to act as a proxy between your HomeAssistant installation at home and the public internet. Supposedly the SSL certificate sits on your device and they have no access to your data. I think this is the right way to do it

But ElementaryOS is in a unique position to monetize which they don't use.

They don't allow commercial applications on their app store. I'd publish there in a heartbeat, if they did.

They are also in the position they (barely) function at a very low cost. They don't need a lot of cash flow to make a huge difference.

If someone has a way in with them, please please mention this. I'd hate for ElementaryOS to die, I really like it and have followed it from the beginning.

It's the only Linux which strikes the balance between being "normal" and caring about simplicity, consistency and ease of use.

It's more than that, they only allow open source apps AND built with GTK.

I also use elementary daily and I cannot publish my own app in their store

Well, the Gtk part makes sense since they want to provide a consistent UI.

The weird bit is that it must be hosted on Github.

https://docs.elementary.io/develop/appcenter/publishing-requ...

I forgot to mention - the user can pay $0 for any app. This is the problem which needs to be fixed. All apps are donationware, enforced by the appstore.

This is exactly why I never bothered. Combine that with the fact users can pay $0 and then come to GitHub to complain (i.e. create a support burden), I figured it wasn't the best option for a solo developer to build a business model on.

It would be more interesting if there was more flexibility in the monetization. Options for a minimum price + pay more per seat (for integration with some corporate provisioning software), subscription pricing, one time price + either support subscription or support "piecework" (like bug bounties or developer consultation), and invoicing integration.

I do t know if they’re the only distro looking for that balance Zorin OS also seems to be doing it.

> They don't allow commercial applications on their app store.

Which I kinda agree with, as they want to promote open-source apps first, but I'd also be okay with an option to display commercial apps to purchase or install with a disclaimer that these are not open-source apps.

It'd be nice to have the ability to install Spotify, Discord, and some other popular apps and have them automatically kept up-to-date directly from the App Store. And that wouldn't negate the ability to sideload or use a third-party repo.

Agreed. This is the whole reason I started using PopOS…because it has System76 behind it with a clear funding strategy.

I thought Redhat did a great job monetizing Linux. Commercial OSes like QNX work essentially the same way.

I think worse than that, lawyers are now involved. Given the cost of retaining counsel, the likelihood of either of them getting $26-30K out of this now seems remote. One or both need to smell the coffee, and realise this is a great path to both walking away with nothing...

I don't get why "lawyers getting involved" is cast as such a big deal, either in the one partner's tweet or here.

Like yeah, bringing in a lawyer can signal there's about to be a nasty fight, or if they're drastically unequal parties it's often a power move by the bigger guy.

But if (as claimed) it's for something like drafting a contract to formalize a deal that's already been negotiated to near-completion, it's a no-brainer to have one. That's a few billable hours for peace of mind that the transaction was handled thoroughly and correctly.

I think the point is they are fighting over only ~$50k (and some likely worthless equity), and involving lawyers could easily eat a majority of that money. And that's assuming they never go to court, in which case all of that money and then some will go to legal fees.

I may have miss-communicated.

I was saying "lawyers involved" is not a meaningful demarcation point about costs. How the two partners choose to use those lawyers is.

For example, again, involving a lawyer to draft paperwork to memorialize a contract you're already in alignment on is perfectly normal and a relatively light cost of doing business.

But choosing to vindictively run up each-other's billed hours is the opposite.

I'm sorry that my previous post wasn't clear that I was communicating the possibility space.

That possibility space is important because in these kind of transactions, no matter how amicable or nasty, a lawyer is going to be involved to some extent. Therefore it's meaningless to talk about whether or not "lawyers involved."

Founder disputes (especially at this level) should be resolved through mediation before resorting to adversarial legal battles. Divorcing couples pay 1/10th by going this route.

We get what we pay for. Nobody pays for high quality OSS but advertisers pay very well for surveillance driven adware.

It’s tough for startups too but for different reasons. Startups doing interesting work can recruit top talent but they usually have to offer a good equity package too. Equity is tough since the supply is so limited in a growth company.

If your startup is doing something that is boring as hell or worse adtech, the only option is to have a high margin business or a lot of VC to try to compete with the FAANGs on raw salary.

If the solution to keep afloat was to take 5% haircut than the money situation was not bad. Bigger issue is that apparently there's no agreement between the founders how much company they own and the value of it.

Nice thing about OSS is that Elementary OS license is GNU GPL3.0 which means that project can live on if there's interest in it.

Such projects rarely live after the founder exits. Take Solus for example.

What happened to Solus after the founder exited? It still seems to be available, and their latest release was in July.

Apparently, most people on Reddit and HN feel that Solus lost its momentum after Ikey left. The relatively conservative development Solus is seeing with Josh Strobl et al. isn't sexy enough!

I like how Elastic is making this work. Open source is no longer built/supported primarily by individuals (with a few notable exceptions).

Most is done by large companies with monopolies, since they are the ones that can afford it. React is a good example. Linux/RedHat another. And it makes it easy to rely on them - you know React will be maintained. You know ELK stack will be around 5 years from now.

You need a large margin to be able to give back to the community in this way, sustainably, for a long period of time.

Unfortunately the open source activism movement got political at one point, and lost its charm to a large degree. I am not going to go into the question if that was right/wrong.

There are around 25 million software developers in the world. Total number of software engineers in FAANG, is around 50,000 from the published number from those companies.

So software developers just have to:

- Have the time and patience to spend weeks to months practicing coding quizzes unrelated to their actual software engineering work...

- Pass HR teams arbitrary filter definitions of what is a good university.

- Pass the filters of random interviewers definition of cultural fit.

- Hope the experience and knowledge of these developers, intersects with the knowledge of the developers driving the interviews on the days of their onsite.

- Be able to put up with recruiters processes.

So as to eventually be hired into a bubble representing 0.2% of that software set of 25 million, and get most of their compensation in flimsy stock options.

Is that really easier or even a more interesting option, just to then spend your days maintaining the latest deluded take of somebody else JavaScript framework? :-)

Your 50k devs at FAANG is possibly an order of magnitude off.

I based myself on published numbers from the companies, but would like to have a more precise number. Note I am thinking Software Engineers not Employees.

Really? Where'd you get the numbers for, say, Google? As of 2021, looks like they hire 21,000 engineers, which is almost half your FAANG engineer budget, and while they're big, they're not _that_ big.

The numbers are extremely off - google alone has probably 50k SWEs

I feel this is going to turn into a discussion of what a SWE is, and are Data Scientists or SRE's also Developers or not. For Google I think their number is probably 25,000.

As of 2016 they stopped reporting their split of employees. Something that is actually a decrease in material quality of reporting that Wall Street analysts don't seem to have complained about...

Their last 10k to have those numbers said:

"December 31, 2016, we had 72,053 full-time employees: 27,169 in research and development, 20,902 in sales and marketing, 14,287 in operations, and 9,695 in general and administrative functions."

Alphabet had in the meanwhile 200 acquisitions and their total current number of employees is 156,500 employees ( As of end 2021). Taking the very, very, optimistic view that the number of R&D employees augmented in the same exact proportion and that 1 in 2 R&D employees is doing software development we get a number in the 25,000 to 30,000 SWE's

Netflix has only 11,300 employee and it seems most are content development so lets says 2000 SWE's

Apple has a little bit less employees than Alphabet ( 154,000) and I dont believe in more SWE per employee than Google so let's say another 25,000.

Facebook had 71,970 full-time employees as of December 2021 so I am going to say 10,000 SWE...

For Amazon get's difficult as you need to split with AWS plus you cannot the number of 500,000 employees at Amazon for nothing. Let's say they have 25,000 SWE what looks like a massive number both for AWS and Amazon.

So I am probably in a range of 50,000 to 100,000. Would still mean we are talking about working on small set of 0,2 to 0.4 % of the worldwide professional software developers and I guess the core point still stands:-)

I debated replying to this, since the thread has long since moved on, but FWIW, I work for Google, and I’m in a position to know how many SWEs we have.

In general, looking at the companies you cite, I would estimate that roughly 40-50% of the employees are SWEs, with some variability based on industry. It’s a lot more people than you think.

Apple and Amazon both are way less than 40% SWEs because they employ a lot of lower paid workers (Apple at their stores and AppleCare help desks, Amazon at warehouses and logistics). Facebook, Google and Netflix may be closer to the 40-50% mark.

@belter You articulated the situation extremely well.

It’s a shame the situation cannot be fixed. It happens to some degree at other companies as well and prevents amazing people from being hired.

Yes indeed...

"When A Hiring Committee at Google Fails To Hire Themselves at Google"

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hiring-committee-google-fails...

Hello,

I'm not a 'pure tech guy', but I know enough to do project management and challenge devs of tech choices given a business objective.

I work at a startup for 50% of my normal wage. If the project fail, I simply go back to BigBankInc, work there 1 year or 2, and start again. Easy!

Of course my personal budget and lifestyle are very minimalist, I basically sacrificed my hobbies for my busines project. However I am totally happy with this decision, it improved my mental health a lot. I attribute this kind of 'needs arbitrage' as an outcome of my meditation practice.

Do note however that I do not have a family (yet)...

> The reality is that with their talent they could earn that per month at FAANG.

You are making the mistake in assuming that the FAANG interview process is not based on a tradeoff: they rather send away many competent people than hire incompetent ones. Due to this, many people with deep technical expertise don't get into FAANG. Think of neuro divergent people. Someone like RMS would not ever pass the cultural fit interview. Think of people who know how to code well in the problem domain but can't do so on a whiteboard. Think of people who have the expertise but lack a degree. Yes, examples exist where such people made it into FAANG, but this doesn't mean that it's really possible for someone like them to make it into FAANG.

Yes, many famous OSS people would be hired by FAANG in a heartbeat. But this isn't neccessarily the case for most folks in OSS.

Also don't forget that you make 30k per month when in the USA. Quite many senior developers with "FAANG talents" work in lower dev income countries on proprietary software and for some reason don't relocate to the US. Often, a lot of OSS contributions come from them. Godot for example was founded by someone living in Buenos Aires.

> The co-founders are arguing about 30k's worth of shares.

The company is in one of those situations where it is likely to either fail in the near future or get much more valuable. Like Ford in 2008 at $2, or AMD under $2 prior to their Zen architecture. Arguments about why someone cares so much about so little are equally valid on either side and are not terribly useful.

As it has always been, innovation is made by lunatics on the fringe willing to work for little to no money because they are ideologically motivated.

Also, don't discount the innovation happening at FAANG companies. They do a ton of heavy lifting on boring-but-important problems!

Having interacted with Danielle a few times in the community I can say that she is very difficult to work with and obviously doesn't know what it takes to scale a project like elementaryOS up. It's actually amazing it's made it this far.

> elementary OS, a Linux distribution that is currently ranked as one of the top 10 distros (according to DistroWatch.com)

All DistroWatch measures is how popular a distro's page on DistroWatch is, it says nothing about how popular the distro itself is.

Even if they were in the top 10, I bet the average HNer would struggle to name 10 distros.

You are right that the distrowatch.com page rankings are fairly divorced from other measures of popularity: MX Linux, (apparently a Debian fork by the antiX people) sits at #1 and there are 3 Arch forks above Arch itself, which doesn't manage to crack the top 20.

As a full-time indie app dev, I was insulted by Elementary OS in the same way one might be insulted when being lowballed. IIRC they wanted 30% of revenue and your code had to be open source. Nope! I have to make a living.

Isn't 30% the industry standard for app stores?

Valve takes 30% of game sales.

Apple takes 30% of app store sales and subscriptions.

Although I agree that it's pretty high especially for an indie developer.

Apple currently charges 15% for <$1m revenue. Yes, 30% is pretty standard, however they're also asking you to give up your IP. The open source only policy makes no sense from a business standpoint. Their justification was so the software can be vetted, which is nice for the user, but precludes any developer who has actual proprietary tech (in my case, GPU algorithms, etc.)

Add to that an inferior knock-off of the macOS UX, a half-baked programming language they want you to use, and it's not exactly a winning combo for a developer.

Instead of being purists, they could have highlighted the open-source apps in their store with a badge, giving the user a choice. They could have used say Rust or Go instead of inventing their own language. They could have better differentiated their design from macOS.

Apart from this disagreement, donationware is super tough, the conversion rates aren't great in general -- and this will reinforce the assumption that linux users don't want to pay. It's a shame all round.

They had a strategy to monetize their App Store, so it wasn't totally donation-ware. I think they fumbled by being purists and not accepting closed-source software in their store. I was initially excited about the concept until I looked more closely and found a pretty high commission, the open-source requirement, and some half-baked programming language. These were foolish missteps.

The story makes me wonder if they did have a partner agreement. If they have an agreement, does it include a clause about engagement in the company? It sound to me an agreement, or at least such a clause is missing.

I always recommend writing (and signing) and partner agreement. And include a clause about the expected engagement of a partner.

I think it's important to remember that none of this makes any sense.

"Desktop Operating System" is a thing that has essentially been solved for over 20 years. Apple gets paid partly because it keeps a pretty good one going. Microsoft gets paid to tweak them and mostly make them worse.

So it's easy to get fooled into thinking you can make money by making a "good" operating system, because very large companies are visibly overpaid for doing so.

Forgive my naivety, but if one person wants to continue working on a FOSS codebase and the other wants to leave, can't the former just let them keep their worthless stake as the company goes out of business, start a new company, rehire the same staff, and resume work?

I doubt they can also take the assets, of which there are (at least) codebase, name, graphics, and domain name. Forking is AOK though, but that's a bit like starting from scratch.

If the company has the money and the continuing founder doesn't, how do they afford to "rehire the same staff"? If company money gets used, the courts that eventually get involved would likely treat the new company as owned by the old.

Seems totally reasonable to keep your shares, if it’s in the low numbers. If not, sell some back to get under 20% or something and not have any control over the company. Forcing your ex-partner to part ways with 100% of their shares is a hostile move.

I was thinking this, too. The only person being completely unreasonable here is Danielle.

bleeding money and key people leaving is the main story here I think with the drama being a side effect.

Seems to be a repeating story with these distros that are stacked on top of already well curated distros. To me it just doesn't seem sustainable because the work that goes into this is just immense compared to what surplus value you get out of it. Makes me wonder if the novel things these projects add wouldn't be better served simply as separate packages, removing a lot of the maintenance and costs.

I mean, there's really no value versus Ubuntu or Fedora. It's basically Ubuntu + different DE + more bugs. Not surprising they haven't been able to make much money from it.

I didn't understand from the start how another Linux Desktop Environment can make a business. We already have at least 4 good ones.

I am curious. Which ones?

Gnome

Cinnamon

KDE

LXDE

I'm sure there are more, but those are the ones I was able to rattle off in the space of 10 seconds.

edit:

LXQT

XFCE

I agree.

Except for LXDE. I would have replaced it with XFCE.

How about MATE? I have never personally used it. What do you think about it?

I like Manjari, too.

honestly, havent used a linux DE for years at this point. MATE was pretty solid last time I used it, though.

Elementary OS is not a DE; it's an entire distribution.

Hmm yes a very common situation actually. I suspect this will lead to the collapse and dissolution of the company. Hopefully the OSS part will continue.

Seems pretty cut and dry. The partner can cash out 50% of a valuable company now or he can control 5% of a bankrupt abandoned mess in 10 years.

Leaving with >50% of the coffers and still expecting the company to provide value for 10 years knowing the current financial state is just disingenuous.

This is sad to read, but I could never take Elementary OS seriously, due to the custom browser.

Not using Firefox (or even Chromium) is inexcusable. The higher integration of the custom browser (whose name I can't remember) does not even come close to outweighing the omission of Firefox with all of its mature features and add-ons. The browser is arguably the most important piece of software in a desktop PC.

Yes, I know I can install it. But then it is not integrated nicely and then why use Elementary OS at all?

With the quality of elementary OS, I thought it required several full time developers to keep up but not knowing how it could make enough money, I even thought it's some rich guy's toy project spending out of pocket money or something but surprised it's run by a few guys with very small revenue and the company's worth seems somehow very small with the talent they got.

Could be a bargain for someone to just hire those guys but of course it means the end of elementary OS but the developers deserve better environment.

> the company's worth seems somehow very small with the talent they got

They started a project on the basis of refusing to compromise (on aesthethic-usability choices), in a niche (desktop Linux) that most users choose trying to escape such refusals by mainstream desktop platforms. They are trying to monetize on a platform (again, Linux) where most people are ideologically bent on producing and consuming software for free. It's like they are actively fighting the platform and the ecosystem at every turn.

The surprise is not how small they are, but how long they've managed to survive on donations.

For me using elementary OS for a bit was truly awful: its UX was the worst I ever used.

It just felt like a gnome reskin, some clunky apps and insane defaults settings on top of ubuntu making everything worse just to please mac users. And yet it doesn't bring anything new on the table and is still way less pleasing to use than macOS (or mac has been doing really bad since the last time I used it).

If some few people really find it nice to use, good for them. But it's no suprise elementary OS is failing.

Completely agree. Booted Jolnir up on a VM when it came out and I was very much unimpressed.

> For me using elementary OS for a bit was truly awful: its UX was the worst I ever used.

100% agree. When I tried to use it a long while ago, it was not good. UI felt clunky and almost unresponsive when compared to similar desktop environments.

I know how hard it can be to keep these kind of projects going as a small team, but seriously - 5% pay cut is all they'll give before they call it quits? (well one of them)

If they are working for sub-20k salaries, they're already impoverished.

Maintaining a distro sounds like an extremely monotonous task. Makes it much harder when your userbase isn't increasing.

Oh man I can't imagine working a 9-5 the freedom of entrepreneurship is calling to me

It is only freedom if you succeed enough. I would argue being a wage worker gives you more freedom in practice in most cases.

Hah, that's funny to me, because after my second burnout, I'm just super happy working for someone else.

I don't have to care about bringing in customers, my signature is only on one contract (employment contract), and the finances, taxes, hiring, and all of that is handled over there. [gestures vaguely to the left]

I love it. I just sit at my desk and write code. This is what I'm happy doing, which makes me feel free.

Co-founders can be brutal when greedy. Best to them.

Good, bad, or indifferent, we all learn from a glimpse into the actual negotiations; unfortunately they may all be for not in this case.

What a shame Elementary OS is my daily driver. It’s a joy to use.

I hope they can set their differences aside and do what’s best for the community.

Why not cater to a specific industry in need of custom operating systems?

The government, natsec, finance and web3 sectors are all flush with cash and in need of good, dedicated, operating systems.

ElementOS could be the OS driving the Web3 industry and the first OS with built in NFT support.

This could be implemented either as a new feature for Elementary proper or as a custom Elementary version.

Early access to Elementary Web3 edition could be distributed via an Opensea NFT auction.

There is no money anymore in Desktop linux (and it is debatable there ever was)

I mean there's no money anymore in Desktop computing period.

But Linux is stuck with GTK and QT/C++ while a lot has moved to .NET and Swift (and other tech - heck even Electron)

All most people need now is a web terminal.

> But Linux is stuck with GTK and QT/C++ while a lot has moved to .NET and Swift (and other tech - heck even Electron)

Are you saying Linux should move to .NET or Swift? Are there specific changes in Gtk and Qt that aren't being addressed in the changes from Gtk3 to Gtk4 and Qt5 to Qt6 that are would be addressed by .NET and Swift?

> I mean there's no money anymore in Desktop computing period.

I agree with this, but there are tonnes of add-ons that could keep the lights on. For example, cloud services (email, identity management, keychain management, cloud backup) integrated in the desktop APIs.

> Are you saying Linux should move to .NET or Swift?

No, I'm saying they need to move out of C/C++. But Electron has filled 99% of that, to be fair.

Qt has QtQuick at least. And even though GTK and Qt have bindings to other languages they're far from good

> No, I'm saying they need to move out of C/C++. But Electron has filled 99% of that, to be fair.

Electron has filled 99% of all memory it comes in contact with, amirite? But seriously, qml and QtQuick are pretty good. PyGobject is also pretty good. And 50% of gnome shell is in javascript[1] using GJS[2], so I don't think it's stuck on C/C++ or the bindings are far from good. Do you have more specific gripes about them?

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell [2] https://www.gtk.org/docs/language-bindings/javascript/

I’d say Rust is becoming more and more common in the Linux user space.

Sad to see, I have always looked on Elementary as a nice alternative to Windows and Mac. I am kind of glad to see that even if the founders seem kind of politically active they haven't pushed it on the official elementary site or repos.

Usually today people seem to want to push politics everywhere, so kudos to them on not doing it.

Is hiring lawyers to fight over ~$20k a good move?

Shame, I always liked elementaryOS.

always do detailed equity vesting…

Elementary is a decade old - what time period would you suggest vesting should last?

Probably not intentional, but Lunduke is using Danielle's dead name in there. Just sayin'.

For those who don't know, Danielle is transgender, and this article is using her name from before she came out, what is known as the "dead name".

Using it now is incredibly rude.

I follow the development of elementary for a while now and even contributed a little bit from time to time and this is honestly the first time I heard of this name change. So I think it is an easy mistake to make and would not automatically assume malice here.

Her twitter (which Lunduke links to, and copied tweets from) very prominently features her new name.

I'm not saying it can't be accidental (in which case you do what you do when you've accidentally been rude - apologize, correct your mistake and move on), but it is at least careless.

A few years ago Lunduke kept sharing some views that I would place in the more “reactionary“ spectrum. I’m not sure he ever distanced himself from that.

He did interview Danielle a few years back however.(1) So maybe it simply was a careless mistake.

(1) https://www.networkworld.com/article/3130760/elementary-os-0...

> Her twitter (which Lunduke links to, and copied tweets from) very prominently features her new name.

It's worth mentioning the twitter handle is still "DanielFore"

This is incorrect, the twitter handle is "DaniElainaFore" - https://mobile.twitter.com/DaniElainaFore

As you can see in the linked screenshots. Try to open the old handle and you will find one tweet telling you she's moved to the new one.

This handle is actually pretty new since the post-sex transition.

This handle is in the archive links the article points to, and that's the important part.

Lunduke had this handle on his screen, and either missed it or chose to ignore it on purpose. The former is careless and sloppy, especially if you're trying to do journalism. The latter is very rude, to put it mildly.

Even if you followed her on Twitter, and "reported" on a thread with the name Danielle staring at you above each tweet?

I'd argue that by that point you'd be pretty aware.

But Lunduke must have known.

Even from my point of view that transgender people don't exist (at least not on earth, our science hasn't developed a way to change the sexual cromosomes throughout the human body yet) I would still call someone by the name that they call themselves, even if it's a name that tipically isn't associated to their actual gender.

Whether someone is transgender or not has nothing to do with whether they decide to physically transition. As well, a person's "actual gender" is the one felt deeply as a part of themselves, not based the sex they were assigned at birth.

Doesn't gender lose its meaning if it's not tied to sex? As in, it is just a person's psych? I am not saying it negatively, I am all for sex having no predetermined effect on someone's behavior. But if there as many genders as there are people, it is no longer a useful term.

According to the theory, gender and biological sex are not inherently tied to each other. You might enjoy reading this essay if you are interested in learning more about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gende...

> Doesn't gender lose its meaning if it's not tied to sex? As in, it is just a person's psych?

What do you mean by "sex"? Would a woman who goes through menopause no longer be a woman because she's not fertile? What about someone born intersex with multiple or no recognizable genitals? What about a woman with a Y Chromosome? That's not hypothetical it's recognized by actual biologists. The reason it's under diagnosed is because it rarely shows symptoms so it's only something someone already taking a DNA test would find out.

Fun fact though, when you meet someone, you forgo the strip search, DNA test, and ultrasound required to actually verify these things. Not only is gender not based on sex, YOU don't base your evaluation of it on sex. Instead you've picked a number of unrelated arbitrary qualities, which is what scientists and I call "dumb". If we're assigning genders willy nilly why should you be in charge of everyone? Let everyone pick for themselves.

You seem to be putting a lot in my mouth on your own.

Let me ask you a question to clarify things: Is ANY gender based in ANY way on the sexual organs (and thus the biologically assigned sex) of ANY human?

> You seem to be putting a lot in my mouth on your own.

That's okay. I'm peering through the internet and into your mind.

> Is ANY gender based in ANY way on the sexual organs (and thus the biologically assigned sex) of ANY human?

Nope. See my above statements for proof.

Nice. Since the answer is "Nope", here comes my point: What IS the meaning of gender anyway? Shouldn't we rather call each human's "gender" their unique personality instead? Since that's what it actually is? What is the meaning of saying "My gender is woman"? What IS a woman? In the past "woman" was tied to the reproductory organ. Since it no longer is, well... let's get rid of the notion altogether. It only serves to put labels on personalities, and these labels themselves are based on ancient obsolete ideas.

> In the past "woman" was tied to the reproductory organ.

At what point did everyone stop strip searching people and inspecting their reproductive organs? Must have been before I was born.

That's ingenious, because everyone did not bother strip searching since they made their explicit conclusions about what was between your legs by the external appearance and behavior alone :)

Honestly, probably intentional. I mean, you can't write an article about a Twitter thread where above each tweet you see the name Danielle and still call her Daniel accidentally.

And this isn't the first time that Lunduke is behaving... reactionary, to put it mildly.

Habit is a strong force, and not everyone is reading display-names all the time. Especially on twitter I usually naviagate by the profile-picture, not the names, because people change their display-names all the time, making them unreliable.

> Honestly, probably intentional.

Assuming bad intent doesn't often help clear up conflicts on the internet.

We're talking about a guy who has another substack called Conservative Nerds and "Pronouns: Dude / Duder" in his Twitter bio dead naming a trans person.

Bad intent is a safe assumption. I'd obviously love to be proven wrong and see an edited version of the post, but I'm 99.999% sure that will not happen.

He knows exactly what he's doing.

Lunduke is a self described conservative, and Danielle is a self described "transgender lesbian communist".

It's intentional.

The sad thing is I'm pretty sure he's had her on his YouTube channel before.

He probably has not had her on post transition. It's possible she appeared on the channel before transition, eg. as "Daniel Fore" in the past which might be the reason for the confusion.

I know we're supposed to assume good faith here, but I find that really hard to believe.

As far as I'm aware, Danielle didn't "announce" her transition in any EOS channels. But if you look at her profile for more than five seconds, it's pretty freaking obvious. Her name is updated on her Twitter, from which Lunduke based his article:

https://twitter.com/DaniElainaFore

It's updated on the EOS Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/elementaryos/comments/shdouy/update...

It's updated on the company blog: https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-os-6-1-available-now/

And it's plainly obvious on the company YouTube channel if you compare Q&A/livestreams between months:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfyFew7toGw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryu9-F6B2Gs

I would be willing to overlook that kind of flagrant oversight if not for the fact that Lunduke calls himself A JOURNALIST. That he would continue to use her dead-name despite all of the research he's supposed to do as part of his job makes him either malicious or incompetent. Take your pick.

The handle is actually quite new. She transitioned months ago but didn't update her handles until last week.

It is intentional. Lunduke spends most of his time doling out hate towards trans people now. There's a (now deleted) twitter exchange between him and someone he calls "a man in a dress".

He is a very hateful person these days.

That sounds like quite a narrow-sighted view of the man.

The way I see him, he is cheerful, enthusiastic and tries to find joy and fun in technology and computing.

Color me prejudist, but that's probably the polar opposite of trying to find politics in technology and computing.

Besides, not everyone is 100% caught up in this trans-bubble, where being trans is the single most important thing in the universe. I realize it is for some people, a small minority, and that's perfectly OK.

But at the same time, it is not for the vast majority, and most people just don't care that much, and don't pay much attention to the subject, at all. And that's not wrong. It's OK too. And the minority will just have to deal with different people being different. That's sort of their schtick too, isn't it?

Would it be completely out of this world to assume that Lunduke is simply being careless here, because it's not on his radar? I certainly wouldn't go checking if people I've interviewed before have changed gender since last time around, before referring to them in an article.

>The way I see him, he is cheerful, enthusiastic and tries to find joy and fun in technology and computing.

I've been following Lunduke since the Linux Action Show days, read his blog regularly, used Illumination Software Creator and also bought a copy of the comic he wrote. I also dabbled in his own programming language (titled after his last name) back when he worked on it. I agree that Lunduke is cheerful and enthusiastic about technology and computing. I'm prefacing this to make sure it's clear that I've been following him for a long time and am not just jumping on some bandwagon to bash some individual for no reason.

>Color me prejudist, but that's probably the polar opposite of trying to find politics in technology and computing.

Lunduke would be the first to tell you that technology is not apolitical. His public persona is tied to open source activism. He discussed political aspects of technology such as net neutrality, DRMs, big vendor influence in protocols and more at length. Back when I followed his Twitter account he commented on political news very frequently. Further, he has a blog called "Conservative Nerds" where he writes solely about politics. It is evident that Lunduke doesn't communicate about technology in apolitical fashion only.

When you follow Lunduke's political statements it is clear that part of his schtick is to belittle so-called "woke" culture. He framed Torvalds' temporary departure as forced therapy because "he was mean to people". He called a trans woman a man in a dress. There are many more examples I can cite here. He also has shared and promoted various conspiracy theories over the past few years and I am excluding milder and "harmless" ones like his musings about UFOs here.

This is all to say that Lunduke's political views aren't hidden or just presumed but very much out in the open.

>Would it be completely out of this world to assume that Lunduke is simply being careless here, because it's not on his radar?

Yes, absolutely. But is it completely out of this world to assume that someone who has a track record of being contrarian on these topics might do this deliberately?

> Would it be completely out of this world to assume that Lunduke is simply being careless here, because it's not on his radar? I certainly wouldn't go checking if people I've interviewed before have changed gender since last time around, before referring to them in an article.

I'd love it if that were the case, but his comments directly aimed at trans people suggest otherwise.

He is anti-vax & anti-trans and you just have to scroll down his twitter feed to see just how hateful he is. Finding "fun" in technology is not telling women that they are men in dresses, using their deadnames, or vocally pulling your kids out of school because of "medical tyranny".

I have no love for the wacky Linux Sucks guy anymore. His radicalism and hate has coloured his views too much for me.

Yes, it is narrow minded of me to shut him out of my headspace forever. But y'know what? That's okay. It's just Bryan Lunduke. Just some guy. He's as relevant to me as I am to you.

> Finding "fun" in technology is not telling women that they are men in dresses,

But they are biological men. Unless they had them surgically removed, they have penises and can reproduce by having sex with biological women. This part is literally un-debatable.

But having constructed a psyche different from your own biology (or how you are perceived by others) is entirely normal. I may picture myself as a tough guy. While others would probably point and laugh if I said that out loud.

That some people happen to have constructed a psyche with a different sex than what their biology dictates, does in no way change their biology. It's just another case of the utterly normal psyche <-> reality mismatch.

By all means. Feel like a woman. Do things you typically portray that women do. Feel free! Do whatever you want. Go grazy! I won't care, and I certainly don't hate. And the same is probably the case with Mr. Lunduke.

But we do in no way recognize a biological man as a women. That's not "hate", and you should stop framing it as that. It's just basic biology for you: Men are biologically programmed to find a mate, a woman. A real women. And we can tell these guys aren't. Sorry :)

Hacker News should just remove the link to the blog and replace it with the actual twitter thread. There's no additional information provided by Lunduke, and based on earlier work by Lunduke, it unfortunately looks intentional.

The deleted tweets are added by him. So it does have a bit of additional information.

Of course there is additional information in this link: it shows tweets that were deleted and Cassidy's retort.

I think the context, although minimal is important as someone who isnt following Elementary closely.

This is one great example on why Linux do desktop is failing hard in my opinion. People spend more time arguing about BS than anything else. Guy wasn't happy with his pay, left to another company and now he's asking even more, from a failing company.

If he just wants to kill what's left he should just say it.

Nah, the thing is there is no single way to create a Desktop for Linux, What I want from a Linux Desktop is opposite what GNOME users want, what Red Hat or Canonical want is also different from what volunteers want. Windows and Mac have 1 direction, the big ego dude on top will decide where things go and all the developers will have no choice and implement it.

Other big issue is money, volunteers that work a few hours in some weekends can't have same output as someone paid to work 8 hours a day.

If I had a ton of money I would hire a big team of developers from eastern europe, fork KDE and give them a clear direction(fix all major bugs, fix design issues, make it just work on certain hardware)

Edit: there will never be "One Linux Desktop" we will always have at least 2 or 3 very popular ones, one for power users, one for GNOME/Apple types and one for minimalists

> Edit: there will never be "One Linux Desktop" we will always have at least 2 or 3 very popular ones, one for power users, one for GNOME/Apple types and one for minimalists

And all those "very popular ones" put together with the less popular ones will have 1% of market share and will never have high quality common commercial applications or high quality first party drivers or games that run on all distributions, etc.

It's a sad story, and I say this as someone who used to be on desktop Linux for years and years and have been around FOSS for 15+ years.

It is what it is, we can't force people to work on GNOME and honestly Linux is not such a great of a kernel, the world needs something modern maybe Fuschia.

That is why when VMWare became good enough to run Linux, I just packaged my Linux zealot stuff and went back to Windows.

Yes, it is sad, but I wouldn't go as far as OP to claim that Linux desktop "is failing". That would be the case only if the goal of desktop Linux was to "get a considerably large market share". When I am contributing to FOSS, what I care about is that I improve it for whoever is using it now - maybe it is just 5 people in the whole world, that is fine. Sure I would _like_ if it was 5 thousand, and I will try my best to ensure that, but that is an extra, not the end goal.

This story is so strange to me. I get that if you read the papers and whatnot, you could think this.

But the charge of "low-quality" is just gobsmackingly daft in the face of the real life experience of people who use this stuff everyday. It may not have some of the bells and whistles, but it works. Every day.

The only "low-quality" I see is the struggles of the poor everyday folks in the Windows world who consistently have to deal with waking up in the morning once in a while and finding that Windows (or one of the big app makers like Adobe) has unilaterally decided to change or break your workflow and there's practically nothing you can do about it.

Random example. Find a big desktop publisher or any kind of big 2D graphics companies, I mean companies that create posters or stuff for websites, etc.

Disregard the OS and count how many graphic designers use non-proprietary applications for their main workflows.

I disagree. I've been using desktop Linux for 15+ years. I spent a lot of time a solo dev and yeah I was blown away at all the b.s. I had to deal with as far as making it run well. Then I got a job working for a larger company full of Macs and Windows. Man the problems those people were having? No freakin' way. I'll stick with Linux and its quirks. It's way less hassle than Windows or OSX.

Near as I can tell the high quality features that come from commercial applications center around: * Telemetry and ads embedded in the apps and the operating system * Upgrade costs * Abandonware * Lack of older hardware support * Lack of configurability * Not owning the software you run

> * Telemetry and ads embedded in the apps and the operating system

I imagine you're talking about Windows. It's annoying but for an experienced Windows user it's a 10 minute set up to get rid of them when you install the OS and at most another 5-10 minutes when you upgrade the OS.

> * Upgrade costs

Windows 10 upgrades are free :-)

> * Abandonware

Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Apple tends to ditch stuff but Microsoft's support for legacy stuff is legendary. That's why many things in the design of Windows are obiectively crap, because they really want to support old stuff.

> * Lack of older hardware support

I heard that Windows 11 bumped up the spec requirements so you're probably right. Windows 10, though, runs well on hardware from 7+ years ago.

> * Lack of configurability

Meh, after a while you just want something stable. And I say this as someone who was patching Conky and configuring FVWM for hours on end.

> * Not owning the software you run

This is primarily philosophical. In practice it doesn't matter much.

Especially since Linux distros are frequently self-serving too, see the many projects started and abandoned by Ubuntu.

A lot of your comment in practice is anti-proprietary FUD straight from Eric S. Raymond's book from 1998.

Everything has drawbacks in practice and not even Open Source devs are saints. See Gnome devs, Poettering, the glibc maintainer from a while ago, etc.

First, if you read what I said carefully I'm not just talking about operating systems but mainly "high quality commercial applications."

But to your point about Windows, why does it need to take an "experienced" Windows user to turn off ads at the OS level? In the U.S. at least all of our privacy laws center around a "reasonable expectation of privacy."[1] A private company adding telemetry and ads to an operating system erodes that expectation. If people accept that Microsoft can do it then it becomes easier to justify it state actors (for instance) do it. The same goes for what happens in software apps.

Upgrade costs: I'm talking about software here, not operating systems.

Abandonware: Cool for Microsoft.

Lack of older hardware support: Cool good for Windows. I still game on an even older laptop running Linux.

Configurability vs stability. You can have both, as I think you know.

Owning your own software: You've never run Adobe's Creative Cloud then. The SaaS model here isn't just a philosophical difference, it's a trap for anybody who can't afford spending > $120/year[2]

Yeah Linux distros (and their software) can definitely be self-serving, and that's awesome because anybody who doesn't like the direction of an open source project can fork it and go their own way. Yeah it leads to fragmentation, but with 7 billion people in the world there's plenty of room for that.

FUD: FUD implies disinformation. What did I say that isn't true?

And yeah I agree that everything has its own drawbacks. I'm just saying that there's plenty of high quality software in the non-commercial world, from operating systems all the way down to text editors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy_(United... [2] https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

I can't help but think that if Linus had been more opinionated about what happens outside the kernel things would have gone a lot better for Linux Desktop. The kernel works because of his benevolent dictatorship and insistence on doing things certain ways, a certainty and direction that is lacking in the wider ecosystem.

> there will never be "One Linux Desktop" we will always have at least 2 or 3 very popular ones, one for power users, one for GNOME/Apple types and one for minimalists

Conceptually there is no reason these can not all be the same DE with different configurations. KDE likes configuration, but GNOME has more market share and seems to hate the idea that people might actually want to do things with it.

Personally, I think Linux Desktop missed a huge opportunity to have embraced GNUStep in the 90s as its one true path.

Probably the only one company that may direct Linux Desktop in any direction at all is Valve. They launched Steam Deck running on a Linux distro, they made SteamOS, etc. They clearly are taking steps in Linux, but obviously the community should get behind it, which isn't happening in a good scale.

> which isn't happening in a good scale.

I'm still waiting for my Steam Deck, so there must be hope

I admire your optimism, but almost every Steam Deck review complained about the UI. All the work under the hood looks really good, with Proton and pressure-vessel and so on, but they just don't seem to have the almighty yet tasteful UI dictator that a desktop distro needs. Unfortunately, that is also the part that the community cannot help with.

Still, can't wait to get mine and play around with the desktop. Ironically, I was planning to use mine for contributing to elementary, after having been locked out for a while (ARM Mac).

I completely agree but there have been always two forces against it: 1. People will do in their free time whatever they want. 2. They rationalize it with "competition is good".

And so here I am, the only Linux desktop user in a team of 20 developers with Macs. My faith is strong for I'm the guardian of freedom.

Started in the 90s with Slackware and have tried at least a dozen distros and right now my algorithm for installing a distro: choose a popular one, install, if drivers work keep it otherwise try another. Couldn't care less about Gnome vs KDE, pulseaudio vs whatever, systemv vs systemd, rpm vs deb, directory layout, bla bla bla...

So for example the Desktop is created from different independent parts (maybe now is different in GNOME case where it might be a big blob). So you have the Shell, the Window Manager, the toolkit for the applications and maybe some core libraries.

Now say you want to change the fonts to only use Comic Sans, you need to cnfigure the Shell, the toolkit and Window manager(for the font used in the window toolbar), a place to select Qt fonts and a place to configure GTK3,3 fonts so you have 3-4 different places. In Windows most apps would use whatever fonts they want, can't remember how is on Apple. On KDE the different components are threated as independent, your distro configures them and you have a Settings application that will dynamically plug the different stuff to give you configuration, this is why you get different places that allows you to change fonts. GNOME will not let you configure Qt fonts, and they will attempt to hide the options for you since they don't want to support anything then their hard coded stuff and the theme their designer loves.

You can't put more Settings in GNOME and obtain a KDE< KDE is different because on how it is created, small team of volunteers working on their small application and component without a big ego dude deciding if we should add a button or menu. It suffers of being designed by developers and actual users and not a pro designer that never uses the shit he designs for.

>Guy wasn't happy with his pay, left to another company and now he's asking even more, from a failing company. If he just wants to kill what's left he should just say it.

That wasn't my understanding at all. Looks like, he left for another job to secure his income while also reducing Elementary's costs (due to not having to pay his salary). Other founder automatically assumes they should get the whole company now. End of story. Sounds to me like he just doesn't want to give up his share in the company, at the end of the day, which is 100% his right to do, since he _owns those shares_.

Always weird to me when people suggest that the Linux Desktop is a failure. Keeping a solid percent of all computers when your competition is effectively a coalition of the richest companies in the world should be seen as a rousing success. Anything thing short of complete annihilation is a great accomplishment.

Keep calm and continue using Debian.

Sad news. Elementary is the only distro with a decent UI.

A decent UI out the box you mean: one that doesn’t require a few minutes of tinkering around to make more palatable. But ZorinOS 16 is beautiful, as is Deepin.

Not surprised - I've had a bad feeling about Elementary ever since they tried to guilt people into paying for it:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2883114/should-you-pay-for...

I respectfully disagree. Regular donation prompts bring in peanuts. If there was a thriving economy for end-user open-source software then we could blame them, but it's just not how it is right now.

I have no problem with encouraging donations. My objection was to the language they used initially, e.g. from the article I linked:

"We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com