There's been a shift away from vague distrust of corporations (think Slashdot) to full-on embrace. The fallout from that is we can't imagine platforms that don't require tens of millions of dollars to bootstrap, and we cling to the ones we have because they're so expensive.

Too big to fail is not the hacker ideology I grew up with. Maybe that's gone now.

There's very little in the open source space that competes with, for example, npm + TypeScript + VSCode for usability (where "usability" here runs the gamut from package / dependency management to code comprehension / documentation / refactoring to debugging).

That kind of polished integration often costs money. In contrast, in the open source world we limped along with gcc + gdb for decades until Clang was able to force the issue (which was funded by Apple, Google, Microsoft, ARM, Sony, Intel, and AMD).

That strongly depends on your definition of "usability". If it means appealing to the lowest common denominator, that's probably fair. Open source software tends to lean technical, because it's made by technical people for themselves. If it means being useful to the people who use it, then I don't think your argument holds water. NeoVim and Emacs at least fairly compete with VSCode, npm is not at all special in the world of package management (Julia's Pkg and Elixir's Hex come to mind as OSS superior offerings), and the world of programming languages is chock full of better languages.

To directly counter your "npm + TypeScript + VSCode", I counter with "Hex + Elixir + NeoVim".

> If it means being useful to the people who use it, then I don't think your argument holds water

I recently worked on a project involving a couple Docker containers, one of which wraps a Postgres DB and the other extends it.

Some of the features of the extension are broken because the Postgres maintainers changed something key in their Docker image (they disabled the DB listening on localhost) and the scripts the extension generates assume localhost is accessible.

In the (volunteer, free) open source ecosystem, nobody is paid to have that be their problem to solve and so problems like that, to my observation, rarely get solved because these two groups are unrelated to each other and it's nobody's job to make sure "the whole offering" is easy to use.

(And as an ardent and frequent user of Emacs, I simply must see the config file someone claims to have put together that competes with VSCode for managing TypeScript projects. That's a hard claim to swallow without evidence; I've tried, and it's extremely non-trivial. Emacs just pulled in eglot for LSP support... Not that one couldn't self-install it earlier, but every time you have to mutate a system to one-off your own solution you increase the maintenance burden of that system.)

... I'll have to carve out some time to look at Elixir. In my world, of course, "Doesn't have a tool to compile to JavaScript that has made it to v1.0 yet" is a major strike against it, but my problem domain is specific. ;)

> Some of the features of the extension are broken because the Postgres maintainers changed something key in their Docker image…

I’m not trying to set the wrong tone here but… how hard is it to modify a docker image that is used as a fundamental part of a production system? There isn’t someone who’s job it is to wrangle these things?

Not hard; once we knew why it broke it was easy to fix. Took half a day to figure out why it was broken though.

Key thing is: these two teams maintaining two separate Dockers aren't part of the same org, so there's no incentives to align either image to not break the other. If they were commercial entities driven by maximizing userbase or revenue, there would be reason for them to minimize breaking each other (especially if they were the same company; then someone's in charge and can tell one team or the other "Fix it or you're fired").

I found Dahl’s approach to packages with Deno very interesting. It decouples package management from the runtime’s tool chain. So a package manager isn’t needed. (Instead a proxy can be used as a cache similar to how an artifact registry would work.)

Which free languages/ecosystems? I can't really think of a major tech company where that's really true. You've got companies built on C/C++, PHP(fb), JavaScript, etc...

All of those languages and their ecosystems had major corporate backing before today's megacorps used them to get to where they are.

I'm not sure what you're hearing is "we can't do it without corporations" so much as it is "the ones sponsored by corporations are better."

I mean, GIMP exists, but any one of a half-dozen commercial products built by fewer people in less time are easier to use and have better feature lists. It's not that it's not possible for GIMP to be best-in-class, it's that it isn't best-in-class. (And sure, dear reader, GIMP works perfectly well for you. Great!)

Given more time, I'd love to explore the idea that "most of the corporations were built on free languages and ecosystems" given how many of the companies we're talking about today seem to have some roots in C, developed under corporate control. But definitions are everything in a statement like that, so it probably would take a lot of time to sift through and ultimately convince nobody either way.