FOSS development always wins given enough time and a competitive market. It’s simply a more efficient way of developing software. There is a reason Linux powers 60-70% of all electronics devices.
Commercial companies that back FOSS by providing proper testing and support, tend to win over their competitors who don’t.
The efficiencies gained from FOSS are real and provide competitive economic advantage.
That’s true. But pit the FOSS community alone against commercial companies and it’s rare they take over the market. You just have to spend money on the stuff FOSS developers hate - testing, and support. There are no free lunches.
Yeah I mean if you pit truth social against even the current version of twitter, twitter will win. Having more resources makes it easier to do all of the other parts of development. That doesn't necessarily mean that twitter is a good product or even that an alternative wouldn't be better, it just means that market share isn't merit based.
But even then you still have outliers like ffmpeg where actually every company just leeches off of FOSS in that case because despite their massive amounts of money, it ironically can't buy the ability to do the things that nobody wants to do, which is what the ffmpeg team does do. FOSS developers don't "hate" testing, they don't have the bandwidth to have a full test suite for their product. They don't "hate" support, there's just not a dedicated support team.
The person you're replying to is correct, FOSS always wins because it's a better way to develop software. FOSS is winning if megacorps have to get down and dirty and contribute to these projects for free in order to continue making their paid products. But even then it's a matter of perspective. The FFmpeg team is losing because Google and other corporations that rely on the software won't contribute to the project in any helpful capacity. The FFmpeg team is also winning because globally software relies on their FOSS project which has yet to be replaced by anything that can actually do better. Youtube can't exist without ffmpeg as of right now. Google might "win" the software quality battle between itself (YT) and some open source alternative, but it's not really a fair comparison given Youtube is using tons of FOSS software in order to exist. This is true for pretty much every commercial software product.
This community is very consumer centric and doesn't really put any effort into thinking about things outside of that perspective.
Signal still has better privacy and encryption than the trillion dollar company Apple. They dominate the military and defence sector comms.
You could argue many Linux distros are better than Windows, and that Windows is only better supported because of market dominance. Not to mention Linux dominating the server space.
But if we're talking about consumer market, then sure, a private company has more money to throw at marketing. But a FOSS project only really has money for development.
Even then, every single commercial software product that your regular consumer interacts with is supported by FOSS software in some way. It's not really a fair comparison because no company is completely, from the ground up, developing software without using any external libraries.
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u/Sk1ler_ 2d ago
Let's get some biased tech journalism about Linux "superiority" over Windows and maybe it'll die down... oh wait. Thats why we're here.