Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

I wish it was that attractive to just switch from “expensive and evil proprietary software” as the author suggests.

1. The article claims that Microsoft Office 365 is $100 a year. In reality it's about $70, home license for up to 5 users is $80.

2. The article does not mention that every Office 365 user gets bunch of additional services. For example, a tebibyte of space in Microsoft OneDrive for each user, 60 Skype minutes per month, etc.

3. Each Office 365 user can install Office apps on 3 devices: his phone, tablet, and computer. Office apps are available on Android and iOS as part of the package. $70—$80 a year price tag includes not only Windows apps, they work perfectly fine on smartphones. Personally I make grocery lists in Excel, open them on my phone, fill my shopping cart with items, and track how much I'm going to pay or if I'm eligible for coupons.

4. I'm not aware of any decent OneNote alternatives. I researched it some time ago because I desired to self-host my notes. There are pretty much no comparable open source or free cross-platform apps which can work with notes in cloud or on a remote server from your mobile device. With OneNote all of my notes are available on my mobile devices. I strongly believe that OneNote is one of the best apps Microsoft came up with in recent years.

If you look around, you can see that 1 TiB of cloud storage alone costs $100 (Google Drive) or $120 (Dropbox). Office 365 offers not only that but also quite possibly the best office suite on the market for $70 for 1 or $80 for 5 people.

Note that so far I have not touched the question of quality of software at all — only the most basic functionality and packages. Microsoft Office is the most popular office software package for a reason. My exposure to open-source office packages is limited but here is at least one dealbreaking example. I tried recreating my spreadsheet for tracking caloric intake in LibreOffice Calc. It was extremely painful — among many other features Calc does not even support tables like Excel does.

I use another software package mentioned in the article — Kaspersky. I'm going to assume the author is talking about the package I'm using — Kaspersky Internet Security — since the price is stated to be $40.

Like with Office 365, KIS is not only an antivirus. It's also a firewall, parental control tool with a list of inappropriate websites, an adblocker, etc. It provides quite a lot of functionality, some of which, frankly speaking, should be in Windows itself. For example, KIS can autoupdate software.

Like with Office 365, article does not mention that $40 buys you a license for up to 3 devices. KIS is also available for Android and macOS.

But overall, an antivirus is not necessary in modern Windows system, so you may skip on these $40.

I always like to think Free/Open source Software is the only known occurrnce where socialism works. You give 100% of what you have for free as a programmer, but in that very same moment you make everyone, including yourself, richer and more free. As software does not get consumed, everyone's assets rise.

I like to think of Free Software Developers as rational actors. So while they certainly deserve my gratitude, I disagree that we owe them any other compensation that they didn't specifically ask for.

As the author notes, developers, doctors, lawyers, etc. know their value and charge accordingly. A developer who charges $0 for his work product must, therefore, be making up that value elsewhere. Most major Open Source projects certainly are.

Chrome, Linux, MySQL, and lots of other big names all have corporate backing. Large companies paying people to build software to advance their agenda. Commoditize the Operating System to sell more servers. Control the Browser to keep the rug un-pulled from your web empire. There's really not a lot of pure charity to be found.

True, you do find the occasional artiste working away for no money, living the officially sanctioned stereotype for what an open source developer is supposed to look like. But I tend to hope that he knows the score and is therefore looking out for his own interests.

There are lots of good reasons to develop open source. But I don't consider "charity to big companies" to be one of them.

I agree, however: > Just how much free software do you depend on? A text-editor? A programming-language runtime and toolchain? A operating system for that to run on? A platform SDK for the developers of that platform? A kernel surely?

there are many people who use closed source editors (sublime/VS), on a nonfree tool chain (VC++) on a nonfree OS (windows) with a closed source SDK And kernel.

What about the servers you deploy to? What about the toolchain used by the upstream platform developers you depend on? What about the software powering their CI-systems?

Whatever free software they depend on, you indirectly depend on too.