The latter particularly being membered by all the big corpos and introducing, controlling, and deprecating standards as they see fit and regardless of pushback from the public.
Kinda hard to be cynical to the point of paralysis on a startup forum based around startups when 90% of startups fail, no? If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode. Don’t get mad, get sovereign.
Please clarify your message if it’s not from an LLM, I’m not sure what you’re suggesting or stating even.
Your reply only acknowledges the last line and doesn’t explain any of the other poster’s thoughts either. What did they mean by any of the following where they discuss “building” and what does that have to do with using Firefox:
> the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build.
> If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode.
Marketing is a way smaller reason than many people imagine—it’s mostly usability. See the nearly immediate mastodon mass-exodus after getting millions of people to give it a shot. Yet most people that use signal probably don’t even know what open source means. Try to find a full-time professional photographer or designer that’s never tried Gimp, but immediately abandoned it. (The project is making a serious concerted effort to turn it around though! <3) But see how many professionals used Inkscape in their regular workflow. Even Blender, which is dramatically more complex than gimp, but after years of concerted effort, is a very useable application. Even with Autodesk doing their best to completely own 3D modeling, Blender is still an absolute juggernaut.
I think a lot of it comes down to who makes product decisions.
For open protocols, engineers with experience deploying things in real-world situations should obviously call the shots. We don’t need bean counters unilaterally deciding about things like Pocket integration, or shoving chatbot features into every crevice so they can look cool on LinkedIn.
But the people steering end-user-facing tool projects should be product people who are primarily interested in solving tangible real-world problems. Technical people often prioritize technical consistency or ease of implementation over usability, and incorrectly assume that nontechnical end users will be fine with it — they just need to RTFM Amiright? Technical people also tend to overestimate their ability to reason about design problems the same way that some designer might vibe code a few things, read a book about Python, think they’re basically a web developer, and then start saying confidently incorrect things about technical topics.
Alas, product managers and designers are not an easy fit into regular FOSS workflows. I’m sure someone with good organizational management skills could totally devise a FOSS project structure that would do the trick.