I’m not sure they’re wrong.
Open source will never spend time marketing anything, never spend time educating an actual mass of general users as to its virtues or how to use it well, and suffer as a result. You don't have Desktop Linux that blows everything else out of the water because that would require investors to stake a lot of money doing these things, which they will only do if there is profit. PopOS gets as close as you might with something like that, but is ultimately shackled by the fact they cannot sell their software. (Enterprise is different, where I guess you can nerf the product to make money on servicing instead).
Even someone with infinite resources cannot do what a company selling something for a profit can because they are either ultimately captured by and beholden to some other interest other than the product itself, or constitutionally lack the energy to be daring and actually compete. Imagine what someone could do with a Firefox sold for a profit because of its superior functionality and superior efficiency.
turns on imagination…Firefox eventually goes all-in on making profit from selling user data and making advertising deals after they realize that the vast majority of users are totally fine with the default and other free options and have no interest in paying for your product.
But if Firefox ever decided to make a lot of money by selling good browsers at a high price to paying users, well I think the result would be quite interesting.
Selling software is not a novel idea.
And I would pay an enormous amount of money for a browser that worked well that had features I've always imagined a browser should have. And I don't expect anyone to make that for me without the reward of getting nice stuff for doing so.
No one would bat an eye if Firefox were no more since there are other browsers more or less just as good, more or less just as bad. It's an immemorable product, the consumer surplus of which compared to the best alternative is very low.
MailMate is closed source donationware with a bus factor of 1, which is just hilarious. As I understand it, the “sell a mail client for a one-time payment” model turned out to be insufficient to support the single developer, leading to the whole “patron of a for-profit company” theme.
I pay for FreeBSD and KDE. Because I believe in them. But I don't want them to make a profit. Once they do, the people receiving that profit will want to see a rising trend. Because business believes that a steady profit is decline, there must be growth at all costs. Once they reached the limit of what the market will bear, the focus shifts from giving the customer what they need to extracting as much value from them as possible. This is a death spiral because extracted value can never be infinite. The result is the phenomenon we now call enshittification.
The lack of a profit-driven approach is the only sustainable way to avoid this in the long run. Sooner or later it will always happen. Even if you have intelligent and ethical investors (which are extremely rare) sooner or later some sharks will buy it.
In fact the phase where a product truly has the customers' interests in mind is usually not very profitable but instead a gamble by investors, sacrificing short-term profits with the goal of extracting much more from the customer once they believe in the product and are too locked-in to leave.
I think this illustrates what I believe you get backwards well. It's not that getting good quality and concise software requires traditional investors and a centralised force of vision. It's because doing software in general but specially desktops is hard.
I think Linux is not what it is despite investment, I think it is what it is because of it. Look at Windows and Mac, they show that they listen and develop their products with users in mind just as far as the market and investors let them. They will otherwise push anti-consumer features (like ads in the start menu) without even batting an eye.
This belief that profit drives innovation is just silly. Profit drives profit, innovation and competition are accidents. In a world with Googles and Amazons, Microsofts and Teslas, I am really baffled that it isn't clearer for us in tech that this is exactly like this.
The state of Linux and opensource in general, flourishing for decades is a living testament to that. Opensource is not only moral, it is the practice that we know to be the most sustainable and resilient in the long run.
I feel compelled to write, though, that even though I frame profit in this bad light, they are only so when the they are the ultimate goal of your product. What countless enterprises are enabled by Linux and OSS initiatives? What vast amounts of money flow only because Foss and OSS are the way they are?
The problem is that "innovation is driven by profits" is a religious credo at least in the USA. If you’ve ever read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, you would laugh at how silly it is, how transparently absurd the "story" is.
Then you realize that a lot of billionaires in the USA consider this book as a scientific economical treaty. And they have the power to make it true and to brainwash everybody, including politicians, to believe it is true.
As it is the 40th anniversary of the GNU project, it worth remembering that software has always been created as free and open source. It was how innovation was possible. To the point that, in 1976, a young Bill Gates had to write an "Open Letter to the Hobbyists" which could be summarized as "Stop sharing! Please! Give us money and stop sharing stuff between yourself. We want to be a profitable industry, not an innovation playground".
That highlight how nobody took proprietary software seriously at the time. But people listened. People voted for Reagan (who managed to dismantle antitrust laws because monopolies are good to make lot of money) and, suddenly, making Bill Gates the richest man in the world became a top priority instead of pushing innovation and cooperation.
As Facebook, Microsoft and Google demonstrates every day, a monopoly is never innovating. Every new single "innovation" is from a startup that was bought by fear of having a competitor in the future. So, today, to become rich, you don’t have to make a real innovating business. You simply have to pretend be a bunch of geniuses that could create the next monopoly and be sufficiently good at pretending that an actual monopoly buy you. That’s basically what is now told in every startup incubator (the technical term is "exit" and, as soon as VC enter the dance, you already talk about your exit plans. Which is easier when one of your VC is on the board of an existing monopoly. That’s how he manage to extract lot of money from his position).
The system is completely unfair, corrupt, suboptimal. But we have to tell the fiction that it works so people don’t request a change.
You can fundamentally disagree with the system, but that means you opt out of all parts of it. And so they might not have been wrong about their belief system being incompatible with business/capitalism, but the idea that they could build something large without compromising was wrong.
I, too, would like Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism - but you cannot get there from here by willing it to be true. (And it chafes me to say that, but that doesn't change the truth of it)
It's a society with lots of capitalism, so of course you'll have people involved who are also involved in capitalism; you'll buy your computers from capitalist companies, etc. That doesn't seem meaningful.
So what do you mean?
I mean that projects don't need to be capitalist enterprises. For example, they can run on donations or grants, with volunteer labor, etc.
Of course there are such projects that receive enough in donations from end users to be sustained but not very many; and in the particular case of Linux desktop environments or distributions there is a lot of competition for users and donations of this type. The successful ones I can think of off the top of my head, such as Libre Office and Lichess are "killer applications" with no serious competition in FOSS.
I'd love to be wrong about that.
Also, as in my other comment, it depends on how we define the involvement of capitalism. See my other comment:
Linux absolutely is carried to a large part by companies employing people to work on Linux. Mozilla needs to find income to pay its own employees. All three are slightly different models, but all three make it fairly clear that you can't cut all ties.
As for the "what do you mean" part, "obtaining money via capitalist endeavors related to the project so non-affluent devs can actually afford to work on the project" is probably a good enough definition.
In comparison, Signal is small - and even it can only make it because an extremely affluent person (Brian Acton) carries them. It's not reproducible for larger projects.