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Comment by Muromec | Hacker News Reader

But writing a tiling wm is fun. Writing software collaboratively is the point in itself, not just the means of getting some kind of artifact in the end.

Being an open source developer means having agency over your goals and means to get to them, which you often don’t have when doing commercial software development.

You sure end up with roughly edges, but the. IKEA-effect kicks in and you like it anyway.

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Right and this holds the platform back. I'm all for hobby development- I've been an supporter of open source software for over 2 decades. But nothing much has changed since that time in terms of UX and user-friendliness. (Yes I am aware a lot of things have changed, but as much as things have changed - much of it is still the same.)

It doesn't hold the platform back because if the hobbyist didn't scratch his own itch he was never going to spend 1000x as much development effort creating a Photoshop competitor or even yet join the effort to triage gnome bugs. We would almost certainly just be less their contribution for no benefit. This whole faulty analysis relies on treating open source developers as a fungible resource like employees of a firm that ought to be tasked with something different. It's not so.

Agreed. If I couldn't write my own packages for my OS and scratch my own itch, I'd never bother contributing to the big stuff.

The appeal behind libre software is the power to go your own way. If the only way to access it was to interact with groups and get your things added through a political process, I'd have found some other thing. Too much of our world is wrapped up in processes and busywork and other empty interaction, it's a waste of time.

Give me the code, the license, a text editor, and a nice cup of coffee, and I'm good. Hold the interpersonal drama. :P

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