Re: Laptop replacement

On 30/03/2025 07:19, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Sat, 29 Mar 2025 14:01:40 +0000, John Rumm wrote:
 

However keep in mind that paying for software from commercial vendors
like MS also pays for large swathes of the "free" software you might
otherwise choose, since many of those developers can only afford to
donate time to open source projects only because they have income from a
"money grabbing" software vendor.

 If only that were true. Most of those money-grabbing businesses are too
willing to take and not give back.

Hmmm, let's see if that lives up to scrutiny...
You might note that the linux kernel has sizeable and frequent contributions from IBM, Google, MS, Red Hat, Oracle. Plus loads of CPU optimisation from AMD and Intel. I don't recall needing to pay for all the work on linux for WSL either.
Kubernates - originally developed by Google, now with contributions for MS, VMWare, Amazon and IBM.
Chromium, initially developed by Google with substantial additional work by MS, Opera, Samsung
React - faceache (Meta), MS, Shopify
VS Code - MS, Read Hat, Google.
Apache Spark - Originally UC Berkeley, now MS, Amazon
LLVM - Apple, Google, Intel, AMD
Android yada yada, the list goes on.
Note that the above include substantial contributions from developers being paid by their employers to make contribution to free software products - not just "spare time" hobby contributions from their developers.

Then we have those users who complain about Free software not being as
good as the proprietary stuff.

That would probably be because in some cases it is not as good. Often when you need software for a new task, you need it now and can't wait the potential years for the free version to get good enough.

If they would divert some of the money they
give to the proprietary vendors and give it to the Free software
developers, think how much better those products could be.

Yup, loads of stuff could be better if someone were willing to pay for it.
--
Cheers,
John.
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