Yet when I look it's mostly buggy, poorly supported and half finished.

Have you tried paying for the open source software?

Why would I pay for something that's mostly buggy, poorly supported and half finished.

So that it is not "mostly buggy, poorly supported and half finished".

Because it's a chicken and egg problem.

Not really, there is already well written solid software for the Mac which I do pay for. What would happen if these companies open sourced their software is most users would stop paying and they would be forced out of business.

Open source devalues developers work.

That is a cop out. It is not "abstract concept devalues", YOU are the one that chooses not to pay.

It’s not a cop out, it’s the objective reality. I and MOST other people choose not to pay.

When something is given out for free, why are you surprised when people take it for free?

Explicitly not the reason tonyedgecomb gave and not the topic of this subthread.

It was implied in what I said.

Open source is better for libraries than applications. I’m happy to pay for software written with open source libraries that works well so I can support developers like myself.

Cannot tell if you are referring to FOSS or $30 software.

That’s funny, every time I come across some piece of unsupported free software, I can usually find a $30 paid alternative that looks better, probably runs better, and someone will answer my questions about it, no matter how stupid they might be.

freeware and people like you have killed indie development. Great software should be paid for. Unless or cures cancer or solves humanity’s issues, it should not he made available for free. Otherwise the author of a paid version is forced into office jobs because some idiot makes a free clone just to have something on their cv.

VLC - though it doesn't cure cancer or anything , its a cure for video player industry(if one exist).. cant think of any other open source video players with billions of installs, and FREE.. calling someone who does opensource as idiot is just ridiculous..

Meh, if the proprietary software has a good UI, it's going to do well -- open source tends to suck on that front, quite often because it's cross-platform and that doesn't favor the OS X look.

Sure, for programmers and command line users there will be alternatives, but that still leaves a large market.

Y'know what's going to kill Apple indie development in our reality? Apple. A lot of the paid shareware has a long pedigree, and the upcoming de-Carbonization will put an end to many small-shop software.

Indie shops that are still shipping Carbon in 2019 haven’t been making good Mac apps for a long time.

They may be making useful tools, which their customers really need, but they haven’t been good (in the sense most people mean by good on Mac, which is notably different from on other platforms) for a long time.

There are several perks to paid software that is typically missing from just free software:

* Guaranteed updates/bug fixes

* Better support

* More polished product

There are free alternatives to basically everything, but people still pay for stuff.

>Guaranteed updates/bug fixes

Such a bold statement. Numerous times paid software produced errors, which went unfixed until the product was discontinued and then you had to buy a new version.

I think "Guaranteed" was a bad choice, but I'm sure it's still better on average than the majority of free/OSS projects.

Unfortunately there will always be a small number of companies using scummy tactics like that, but not most of them.

Also documentation, when it exists (not all apps have or need it) tend to actually be useful instead of a half-assed, incomplete wiki.

(though some paid software in the recent years also have half-assed, incomplete wikis for documentation... my guess is that the proliferation of open source software made a lot of newer developers think that this is how software is supposed to be documented)

Definitely. As someone that helps write wiki content for a open source project it's quite a bit of work, for little-to-no recognition, so I can understand why that happens. Plus you don't know if anyone even ends up reading it.

I still do it because of passion for the project, but it would certainly be easier to be paid for it!

Great software should be paid AND respect your freedom:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Conflating freeware and free software is a really annoying flaw of the English language.

I think using the "gratis" vs "libre" distinction can help alleviate the issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre

So you're saying people should stop making free software just so some guy can make a profit off of his overpriced basic utility app?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for people making a profit from their dev work but when I see something as basic as a cpu temperature meter costing $30 on the Apple store, I'm going straight for the free version. What's even worse with apps like these on the Mac in particular is that the developers often bloat them with useless features in order to justify the price, so in my case I'd end up paying $30 for something I'm only going to use one small portion of.

> Great software should be paid for.

Why?

Great software - Linux - is not paid, and it is taking over the hosting world, and the IOT world.

GNU is great software. nano / pico is great software. python is great software. .NET is great software. it is all open source.

'The best business man serves the communal good.'

I'd be curious to see a survey of founders of FOSS and hear their take.

You wont find too many, as most are either contract workers or just volunteers, because “we want free software” doesn't really translate to pay for hard work and dedication.

> because “we want free software” doesn't really translate to pay for hard work and dedication.

That is one hell of a hot take. RedHat, SUSE, Canonical, would all probably disagree. (also, fwiw, so would I - I have been working on Open Source software for 5+ years, and have been paid for it for the entire time)

> as most are either contract workers or just volunteers

The linux kernel called, said something about having a large amount of fully paid, long term staff.

I get it, you don't like free software - but there is plenty of free software that people are paid to maintain and develop, and it has been a great benefit to software development as a result. Even paid for software is probably using some open source components, (runtimes, languages, compilers, libraries to name a few of them).

These are too few from the massive list of open source software out there. For almost any piece of technical software there is a free clone for it. I like free software, as in free to read the code, but not necessarily freeware.

If the software is simple enough that someone can make it just to have something on their CV, I think a paid developer needs to do something more substantial.

This is how you get bloated apps.

No, this is how you get things that take more effort to make. Bloatware does fit though.

Asking for software that is not "simple enough" is exactly how you get bloated software with unnecessary features that only exist to justify whatever notion of "worth the price" you may have.

Programs should strive to be simple and focus on doing one thing, not try to be Swiss Army Knives to justify their price.

I’ll pay you $30 if you point to me a free open source alternative to Sketch that works better. /s if that isn’t obvious.

P.S. As a non-designer who’d like to use Sketch maybe once every two to three months, the price is pretty steep.

I actually prefer Figma than Sketch, and it's free.

We’ll have to disagree here. Anyway, Figma certainly isn’t open source.

Figma is free as in beer, but not free as in freedom.

part of the reason for this is it costs money to distribute apps for apple devices. $100 a year and xcode (ie mac hardware) at a minimum.