rough at the edges
That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.
That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.
Moreover, lots of OSS contributors are from China, Russia, India, Ukraine, etc - so a company may spend even less paying them for particular commits than buying software from bay area company.
It's more about management mindset rather than insolvable problem.
upd: And everybody wins - more quality OSS code, help developers in poor countries, less money to shitty companies like Adobe.
company or individual, that's true. but there's still big opportunity costs and time factors. Pay someone $1000 now to perhaps get some polish/bugfixes in a release 2 months from now... and do what in the meantime? Deal with 15% more time spent in sub-par-for-my-needs software?
You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just because you paid that money, you may still not get things as you want (or when you want).
That's not even going into the dev market situation right now ...
I mean seriously have you people ever been near a situation where these kind of decisions are made ?
Compared to the competitive advantage of having a software developer on staff?
10 companies each contracting 1 dev for an open-source project is a less-efficient allocation of resources than 1 company hiring 10 devs for their commercial software project.
Efficient allocation of scarce resources is best achieved with comparative advantages. A commercial software team has shared context, management, and knowledge that cannot be as efficiently achieved by a decentralized community of contributors. So the commercial team can produce the same software at a cheaper cost. This is a good thing for the economy.
Figma already did the hard work of prod/tech design and fixing browsers, meaning followers will have a much easier path. https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...
The same short-term thinking has been espoused at the dawn of every innovation. Thankfully some folks don’t listen.
It’s a marshmallow test for adults.
Many might prefer to have shipped features/products in a timely manner instead and how their performance reviews would look, as opposed to some notion of community.
The situations where you can say: "I'm blocked and am waiting on the library/tool developer to have a look at my GitHub issue, so no new release will be shipped until then," are probably not plentiful. Situations where the person in question can contribute a solution of their own are also not as plentiful as we might like. Situations where the person in question is capable of either solving the problem just for themselves (with a custom build of the tool/library) are also not as plentiful as one might hope, due to possibly different skillsets.
Making the functionality someone else's problem behind a contract of some sort feels like a decent choice in an enterprise setting, which is why you see many purchase something like RHEL licenses because of the support, or why many prefer to overpay for cloud services instead of running everything on prem, or even use paid tools that are "standard" within the niche of the industry that they work in.
For many, the circumstances in which they'll adopt FOSS primarily centers around someone else already having done the majority of the work and the solution being good enough: something like MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL in the database space and something like Angular/Vue/React in the front end space, or any number of libraries/frameworks for back end development, tools like Visual Studio Code or Git, OSes like GNU/Linux or other Linux distros and so on.
One might also argue that a lot of the successful FOSS projects out there actually have corporate backing, but perhaps that's besides the point.
But this point from the comment shouldn't be overlooked:
> You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just because you paid that money, you may still not get things as you want (or when you want).
It can’t get done because every company wants to let some other sucker pay for the feature, and then free-ride after it’s implemented. No individual company would pay the $10k, because the feature is only worth $1k to them, even though it’s worth $20k to society.
There are small-margin markets where this doesn't happen, bit then those markets don't have huge companies either.
Kaleidos, the creators of Penpot, built a tool that they need and invested to make it open. And they get recognition for it which builds their brand and gets them more customers and employees.
Paying for feature X and having that advertised in the ChangeLog and on the sponsors page is a sound business decision.
Soon enough, businesses pay fees to Adobe only to have their data taken hostage in the cloud will be known as suckers.
- Take X% of what they pay to Figma/Adobe and donate to FOSS alternatives.
- Every year, go through an exercise to look for missing features on the open source tool that still keeps you dependent on the proprietary one. Take the results from the feedback and give to the developers.
- (If you are a big company) use the results of this exercise to try to negotiate down on the price of the proprietary system you depend on. If you manage to get a discount, take it and double down on the support of the free alternative.
- Repeat until either you no longer need the proprietary solution or the open source alternative surpasses the closed one in capabilities and market share.