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> Commercial solutions are interested in keeping users locked in and constantly upselling more features to them. As a result of that, you get notifications, features, popups.

At this point I'm pretty convinced that non open source software simply isn't viable for end-user applications and tools. The incentives don't work. You always end up with upsells/ads, insane missing features, bad UX, etc.

Closed source seems to work fairly well for some things like OSes, games, and perhaps some big-contract B2B, but not for apps.



This is exactly the conclusion I’ve come to. If I can’t find it on github (or similar) and build it then it’s probably going to do something weird that I don’t like.

I make exceptions for a very small number of games, Minecraft is one. Even then though I usually avoid closed stuff unless I know the game well.

I totally disagree that closed source works with OSes, I couldn’t imagine living with OS X or Windows. Sometimes it feels like the people who build those OSes use a special version that isn’t distributed publicly, how else could they leave so much broken?


> I totally disagree that closed source works with OSes

You might be right, I only rarely leave Linux.


> At this point I'm pretty convinced that non open source software simply isn't viable for end-user applications and tools.

I would agree it's not ideal, or maybe even not desirable, but not viable is a very strong claim when the reality is that 99+% of end-users are using almost exclusively close source proprietary applications and tools.


Yeah, you're right. Viable is obviously the wrong word.




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