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Comment by popcalc | Hacker News Reader

At many users' hourly rates, it's cheaper to just buy Photoshop. OSS is only successful with a real business model.

You don't usually personally contribute major things to OSS because it's a shrewd business move, but because you want it to exist, you want to share, and you reasonably enjoy the process.

(Corporations pouring paid hours into Linux, Blender, Postgres, etc are a different case.)

Interesting how your "different case" is the one with by far the most successful OSS projects...

Cases of paid and unpaid labor are materilly different, even if they contribute to an open-source project.

its the wrong way to look at it. when you implement things in FOSS a lot more people have access to that feature.

With this mentality, FOSS wouldn't even exist. But it does, and modern computing is based on it. So, your mentality might have some problems.

Do explain more. My mentality is that FOSS exists and has thrived through viable business models. Very few people just do charitable OSS work without deriving any benefits from it. Those that do, don't end up lasting very long:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/21/rust_actix_web_framew...

https://web.archive.org/web/20110707151924/http://apcmag.com...

You can get paid to work on FOSS though. Google, Intel, etc… employees contributes to lots of FOSS as part of their jobs.

You don’t have (unpaid) hobbies??

Everyone here already knows that. I've got a list of about 800 things I'd love to see in various packages. Should I hire a team to work on them?

You can[1].

[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-08-23-how-does-our-consultan...

I was being facetious - I'm sure everyone is also aware that you could hire devs to code for you. But not to dismiss your point, it is interesting that companies exist purely for the purpose of working on arbitrary free software requests.

Yes. This is a major benefit of free software- you can hire contractors to add whatever feature you need.

But not in the main trunk.

Way back when in the 00s I did some triage to what it would take for adding nondestructive editing. It was basically a complete rewrite of the whole code base. Given that it's 20 years later and it's still not in the main trunk I'd trying to fix gimp is the lost cost falicy

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