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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

> You know what word of mouth is? Worthless for people who don't have eyeballs on a product.

As a customer, I'm tired of hearing this excuse. I get wowed by free, open-source software dozens of times a week. You want me to put eyes on your product? Wow me! I'm tired of "enterprise-grade fart apps" and "B2C photo storage" garbage getting touted as life-changing or impressive technology. If you want to compete, do something impressive. If you want people to look fondly upon your product, consider giving back to the community instead of paying to become their adversary.

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And guess who funds most development for the free open source software you use?

Given that most of the software I use consists very clearly of one-man passion projects where the author struggles to support themselves: nobody. (Remember OpenSSL?)

Most software you use including your web browser? Your operating system?

Yes, most software. A piece of software being bigger or doing more things, does not make said piece of software count more. A program is a program; it's something you learn how to use separately, download/update separately; something which is separate from a project-maintainership and bug-filing point-of-view; etc.

I use four big fat codebases (browser, OS, etc); maybe 10 decently-sized language runtimes like the JVM; and then 800+ rinky-dink CLI utilities. Half of which came from a Github Gist, or which I had to compile from source from a repo containing just some bare source files and no documentation. Yet many of these little CLI utilities individually take up just as much mental space as my browser or OS does; and I get just as much use out of them professionally as I do my browser or OS. (In fact often more, because many of these utilities are multi-platform, such that I use them regardless of which browser or OS I happen to be using.)

Individuals do, clearly. I don't use Google-funded malware. I suppose the Linux kernel may qualify, but plenty of people in real industries also work on that.

From what I've seen, github sponsors, patreon, donations, or nobody.

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