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Maybe those free software projects could use some help in the form of users trying it out and giving feedback.


"feedback" isn't enough to make a free software project good enough. I can give plenty of feedback to a project in the form of pointing out user experience problems. It doesn't help. What helps is

1) People who can actually spend the time to do the work of implementing improvements.

2) People who are willing to make user experience a priority over other things.

The first requires skilled people to spend a significant amount of time. This is time that those skilled people could be spending with their families, so they usually expect to be paid for it. The supply of skilled time that doesn't cost money is very limited.

The second requires incentives to be aligned in favor of getting and keeping inexperienced users. If you aren't willing to delete some code you spent a bunch of time working on in order to improve the user experience, you aren't going to succeed.

None of this requires the software to be proprietary. But it does require that it is monetized somehow -- Perhaps through patreon for example, but that is also non-free software.


In all honesty, you're bringing nothing new to the table here. This is the same FOSS-uber-alles pissing match anybody can see and participate in by spending five minutes on 4chan's tech board.

It's not interesting and serves no purpose on HN.

(earlier comments in furtherance of said pissing match deleted)




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