• enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works
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    1 hour ago

    Ok, while most of these don’t have companies behind them with huge revenues, most work on these projects is done by paid developers, with money coming from sponsorships, grants, donations and support deals. (Or in the case of Linux - device drivers are a prerequisite for anyone buying your product).

    Developers getting paid to work on open source is a good thing. These projects may have begun their life as small hobby projects - they aren’t anymore. (And that’s probably good)

  • lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world
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    30 minutes ago

    Non-profit means the corporation isn’t set up to make a profit and the business operates off of donations instead of selling a product. So there is always a profit motive. I wish more people understood this. Everything from Greenpeace to MADD is still a corporation ran by people who want to make lots and lots of cash.

  • chaotic_ugly@lemmy.zip
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    3 hours ago

    I’m not sure Firefox belongs on this list. Google finances Mozilla’s operation to the tune of $420M a year. It’s not for-profit, but it’s also not the same as the others.

    • yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca
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      28 minutes ago

      Google wants to finance anything they can get their damn search engine into, that’s not entirely the fault of Firefox. I still use a firefox-based browser, but only for now.

      There is ladybird on the horizon, a browser being built from scratch, not based on either Gecko or Webkit.

    • null@lemmy.org
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      2 hours ago

      It’s an easy paycheck for allowing Google as the default search setting. If Microsoft paid as much we would be seeing the same arguments about Bing.

      • chaotic_ugly@lemmy.zip
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        2 hours ago

        Almost certainly not. All the offshoots from Mozilla’s tech rely first and foremost on Mozilla’s production of the foundational software, which eats up a significant portion of their roughly $500M/yr operational costs. The heavy development cost of modern browsers is why everything is either Chromium or Gecko-based.

        That said, Mozilla will be around as long as Chromium continues to dominate the market. Google literally funds Mozilla because it’s cheaper to prop up a competitor than it is to be sued by the government for monopolistic practices (check out 1998 decision against Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows).

    • ExFed@programming.dev
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      28 minutes ago

      Wait, what?!? You got a source for that?

      I’ll be pissed if it’s true… Audacity holds a special place in my heart.

    • flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works
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      17 minutes ago

      Really? It doesn’t look like it - theta been some bleating about lag and far of oy uploading audio but other than a whole lot if argument, I can’t see much in the way of details, let alone facts

      • YTG123@sopuli.xyz
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        2 hours ago

        Not really, it’s still fully FOSS, they were just terrible at communicating what they actually wanted to do and people got spooked.

  • lordnikon@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    What people don’t always remember about FOSS is they are just making it for themselves they are users as well as devs. The great thing about FOSS is if someone else happens to use it that’s great and maybe they will contribute to something they use.

    • rozodru@piefed.world
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      2 hours ago

      yeah I recently built myself a music player because I was just so disappointed with all the available options on Linux. Nothing had EVERYTHING I wanted. Many had really crappy shuffles or just didn’t include one at all. many just wouldn’t play the entirety of your music collection and most simply wouldn’t do both online streaming and local music playback. So I built one that’s TUI based that does everything I want and it’s perfect. Allows me to play music from QoBuz, my Navidrome server, or just local music files OR I can play all three making a “SUPER” music library. Shuffle that ACTUALLY shuffles the ENTIRE collection. search feature, integration with soulseek to download music to either my local machine or navidrome and qobuz search to add to that playlist.

      I’m not going to release it because A. like i said it’s perfect for me and B. I dont’ want to deal with users git issues or having to deal with other devs wanting to contribute. It works, it’s mine, and that’s that. will never see the light of day.

    • mirshafie@europe.pub
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      4 hours ago

      Yeah and they get other devs contributing to their project. Nobody’s making Firefox or Blender as a solo project, but band together with some other nerds and this is what you get.

      • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org
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        3 hours ago

        Never doubt the power of nerds arguing over their specific interests to make something amazing. Wikipedia is arguably one of the greatest achievements of humankind, entirely powered by nerd fights.

  • Redvenom@retrolemmy.com
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    4 hours ago

    When money comes in the picture, then profit is more important than the product, and this people really loved the product they are doing, if they have enough money to live comfortably they get to keep control of something they care and love.

  • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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    8 hours ago

    Apache OpenOffice??

    Surely you meant LibreOffice. OpenOffice has basically been dead for years, with no significant work going on.

    • Naho_Zako@piefed.zip
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      6 hours ago

      Lmao I’ve been doing a digital forensics class online, and it’s always got VMs with ancient versions of software on it, so I got to discover what Apache OpenOffice was. Love that they have to use FOSS to teach us shit since Windows needs a subscription.

      Typo

      I almost wrote dogital forensics. Is that using dogs to find data? Sniff out that hard drive and get datadumping boy!

    • SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
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      6 hours ago

      To expand further on your point, here are the releases for Apache Open Office (OO). We are at 4.1.6. the page for 4.1 release was last updated in 2014. It’s been mainly small bug fixes since then.

      https://www.openoffice.org/development/releases/

      LibreOffice (LO) and Open Office were essentially the same application at OO 4.0 vs LO 4.1. LO had 3 major releases by 2023 before it went from 7 to 24. With the annual releases it is me difficult to gauge progress in the same way. But we are already at 26.2.

      https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/libreoffice-timeline/

      • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        6 hours ago

        OpenOffice was dead before it was transferred to Apache, so it’s not old enough to excuse.

        That Firefox logo is from 2019. Oracle killed OpenOffice in 2011. Like, they actually completely stopped all work on it. They intentionally killed it at least eight years before this image was made.

  • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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    6 hours ago

    Boredom mostly, if their lazy bosses worked them more then they wouldn’t have time to be productive at home.

    /s