In the past weeks I discovered the key to success and popularity: going open source.

But does it get you paid?

@Holyfield3000 Not yet! I'm building my resume.

@Holyfield3000 it can, there are companies which earn loads on support or selling executables while still providing the source code :)

Really?? @linuxxx. What would one research to find out more. I have something that would be dope for open source then 😂 ('seriously, it would help a bunch of devs too')

@Holyfield3000 Of course, look at Ardour and RHEL for example :)

@linuxxx Thanks!

@linuxxx also Synergy, they offer paid binaries for Windoozle users that can't compile from source, but since the source code is freely available, you can compile it or have the package maintainers of most popular distributions do it for you 🙂

There are quite some ways to make money out of open source:

1) it promotes the hardware you are selling. Most HW companies like Intel, ARM, AMD etc. go here.

2) it is useful, but so user hostile that you can sell support on it. Think Redhat.

3) you actually sell proprietary services on top of that software, leveraging community network effect. Think Facebook.

4) the open source version is a crippled demo, and you sell the full version.

5) the open source version comes with GPL, and you sell under another license to companies who don't want to opensource their applications. Trolltech comes to mind.

@Condor for some people, time is actually money, and they don't spend this on half-assed suggested build chains, figuring out lousy documentation and getting all the shit to even compile.

@Fast-Nop of course, especially on Windows I doubt that there's any reasonably good compilers that aren't called gcc. On Linux, same story except for gcc and glibc being pretty much a standard. But compilations and the time it takes to compile everything from source, solve dependencies etc is the primary reason why I don't like Gentoo. I don't want to have to compile everything from source myself when I can just entrust a distributor to get a powerful compilation server and do it once for the entire userbase. In case of reasonably popular software like Synergy, maintainers usually take that upon themselves to accommodate Linux users in that regard.

The big thing about open source though is that you can scrutinize, compile yourself, and change stuff around if you feel like it. There's always some people out there like that. Kinda like us electronics chaps who want to enter the internals of every piece of electronics we touch, and where we despise manufacturer lockdown.

@Condor MS VS isn't bad for Windows applications. On top of that, in real industry, engineers aren't paid to fumble around with builds and examing applications' source, but to actually get shit done that pays. $500 for a program is less than having one guy fumbling around even one day to get the shit working.

On top of that, I'm using GCC for ARM embedded at home, and that also fucking taught me why we are using Keil ARM in my company.

It's not that GCC can't do stuff, it's the time needed to get going that is just prohibitive in commercial use. And of course essential features that GCC just is lacking, and that involve even more manual work. Just try to do a stack usage worst case analysis with GCC and with Keil.

And then there's also OSS where the docs are so lousy and the dependencies deeper than the Mariana Trench where I've been faster to drop that shit and implement it myself.

@Fast-Nop good point. As far as documentation goes, I've found only the Arch Wiki, DigitalOcean and nixCraft to be reasonably usable. And for kernel options I often resort to the Gentoo Handbook. But yeah, having to pay an engineer for them to fumble around with OSS in development is a significant cost where the gain isn't very well defined. I guess that OSS is something that's more common in the sysadmin area than it is in embedded... For sysadmins it's generally preferred for something to be open source so that we can adapt it to our use case. That said, Samba and ProFTPd are far easier than e.g. Postfix and InspIRCd.. because the latter 2 are subjected to developer leetishness wanks. It's a cancer which I'm not sure how to cure with anything other than ending up writing an alternative...

@Condor yeah for sysadmin, stuff is different I guess. Even for hosting, as private customer, I'd say "no thanks" to a hoster who would try to sell me IIS hosting.

Hm and in my domain.. I'd say e.g. the standard GCC linker scripts that you can get online say for Cortex-M aren't professional even if they are by the chip's manufacturer. Stack on top, growing downwards towards the globals - WTF, who would come up with such shit?! That's really basic stuff, but most maker scene projects use that shit right off the toilet because they don't read relevant blogs like embeddedgurus. It works, somehow, most of the time, hopefully.

There's the dark side of open source: open shit, and that's not even counting the whole imbecile PHP ecosystem.

The worst joke in that is that people who dump their digital toxic waste on the internet and increase the research time for other people even feel like benefactors when it would be better if they just went off grid deep in some flyover state.