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Comment by Drbble | Hacker News Reader

It would look like free software looks as compared to Microsoft: edgy, unpolished, more engaging with the audience as a collaborator and not just an consumer, in more niches, non-monolithic, with a more visible connection to the author's humanity.

    :help uganda
    :wq

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Free Software is not Just Vi or Emacs. It evolves into Android, Firefox, Chrome, Eclipse, jQuery, etc. You may get to see work before it is fully ready... But finished products in Free software can also be user friendly and mainstream. And for niches it serves, Free software does a far better job than than the Lowest common denominator that suits the masses.

The parent question was if it was created by hobbyists - Android and Chrome are by Google, FireFox is funded into hundreds of millions of dollars by Google. Eclipse was founded by IBM and funded by its members, including gold sponsors Amazon, Intel, IBM and Cisco, Novell. JQuery is sponsored by Mozilla Corp.

Not really hobbyists, any of them.

To extend your analogy: it would be more "human" and also more specialized. Take a look at all the tiling window managers--more sophisticated than those created by Apple or Microsoft, and used only by a few. I could also see it being more community driven: many open source projects I use have very transparent development policies and welcome suggestions.

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