Heck, they won’t even let you into a difficult-to-cancel subscription! What are they thinking? Think of the revenue!

There is a reason for profits spend a fortune on marketing.

Apache OpenOffice??

Surely you meant LibreOffice. OpenOffice has basically been dead for years, with no significant work going on.

With enshitification nowadays, the fact that they're nonprofit is the reason why the software is good quality.

The Audacity!

If you ever feel like you can't make anything good, keep in mind that companies will intentionally make worse stuff

What if I told you all of these ventures were profitable?

The biggest selling point of capitalism is innovation.

That's why nothing was ever invented before capitalism.

Which makes some wonder how capitalism was invented.

But they are communists and should be shot for questioning the wisdom of the system.

I heard they don't collect your private information and sell it to third parties, either. It's as if they hate society itself!

Will they get away with it? Vee'll see.

I'll go home now, HEY DON'T PUSH ME

They did not, in fact, get away with it.

I don't understand economics but why does there have to always be profit? If someone made devices that last 50 years they would go bankrupt? Make it make sense.

What came first? The innovator or the capitalist??

Being profitable so you can continue to exist does not mean you are motivated by profit.

This is the same argument as "you hate capitalism but you participate in it."

So why is Mozilla shoving AI garbage nobody asked for into Firefox? I seriously doubt that their severely overpaid execs don't have some kind of profit incentive.

It's an older image, not updated.

Blender is far better than anyone not-in-the-know would expect.

VLC does much more than just play videos, but the user interface inexplicably hides most of the functionality. Also, they've vehemently claimed for many years that it's impractical to provide backward frame-by-frame stepping, but Celluloid does it just fine.

GIMP and Inkscape keep improving, with GIMP being the better of the two. GIMP should just copy Photoshop's interface as closely as possible. There's no shame in that, and Photoshop does many things better. Most users coming to GIMP are coming from Photoshop. (Yes, I'm using PhotoGIMP, but that really doesn't do much to help.)

Where is FreeCad in this one? I've started using it after buying a 3d printer, and it's awesome what that piece of software lets me create.

Seriously though, thanks to all the FOSS developers out there. I try to donate $5 to $20 where I can, but I k ow that far from what they all deserve!

Lmao I've been doing a digital forensics class online, and it's always got VMs with ancient versions of software on it, so I got to discover what Apache OpenOffice was. Love that they have to use FOSS to teach us shit since Windows needs a subscription.

In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[58] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[59] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead.[60] Another controversy in July 2021[61] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would "occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA".[62] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added "out of an abundance of caution".[61]

Awwww... :(

Hey at least they removed mentioning it in the TOS!

Yeyyy!... :)

.....:(

That's my main issue with windows in particular. Their bad decisions are known to be bad for the user, but in theory good for the shareholders.

I can accept I'm not the right user for a program or feature, but not that the features are against the users.

Funny you should mention that! The Phoebus cartel formed in 1924 by major light bulb manufacturers, because they were at a point where they were producing light bulbs that could last for decades, and they realized that this would kill their profits because nobody would buy bulbs because they lasted so long, so they made rules to deliberately make the bulbs fail after about 1,000 hours and fined members for making bulbs that lasted too long, effectively creating the concept of planned obsolescence as a business model.

See? Capitalism promotes innovation! In how to profit!

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

They don't want some profit, or even sustainable profit. They want all the profit, and always more this quarter than the previous.

I do understand that if somebody created something that is cheap, lasts forever and there's a limited (non infinite) need for it, they would eventually stop selling. That's why they need to make things last less, or invent excuses to make you buy a new one.

The capitalist imperative is: make as much profit as you can as fast as you can.

The fastest way to make as much profit as you can is not to create the best possible product. Sure, that'll get you far enough- but in capitalism there is never "enough". For instance, you could use the capital you amassed to buy up all the competition and create a monopoly and hike prices to whatever you like because people will have no choice but to buy it from you, especially if it's something essential like food, energy, housing, or what have you.

Of course, monopolies are illegal. Not because capitalism says so, but because society says so, in order to contain capitalism, which would otherwise consume society even faster than it already does!

Monopolies are just one ugly example, there are other ways of making super much profit super fast. Like, stealing! That, too, is illegal, because it goes against the very concept of living in a society, which itself is predicated on the idea that we are stronger and better and happier when we come together and pool our resources.

Alas, I wax verbose.

To expand further on your point, here are the releases for Apache Open Office (OO). We are at 4.1.6. the page for 4.1 release was last updated in 2014. It's been mainly small bug fixes since then.

https://www.openoffice.org/development/releases/

LibreOffice (LO) and Open Office were essentially the same application at OO 4.0 vs LO 4.1. LO had 3 major releases by 2023 before it went from 7 to 24. With the annual releases it is me difficult to gauge progress in the same way. But we are already at 26.2.

https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/libreoffice-timeline/

Being profitable so you can continue to exist does not mean you are motivated by profit.

I mean... it definitely plays a large factor. The idea that these organizations aren't profit-maximizing is very different than claiming they're net negative or hobbyist endeavors.

This is the same argument as “you hate capitalism but you participate in it.”

"We live in a capitalist society and must play by its rules" is merely an observation of the status quo.

I would more compare it to the complaint about a number of socialist states - China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela - that wildly outperform their expectations despite flying in the face of Chicago School orthodoxy. "Well, but they're cheating!" is an allegation made regularly.

Western AI data scrapping companies love to get mad at Chinese AI data scrapping companies for scrapping their data, for instance. American MIC love to bemoan foreign investment in cheap, efficient deterrents. American biotech companies are firmly committed to keeping anything developed in Cuba out of the hands of the American public.

runaway infinite consumption at all costs .... aka ... cancer

Shoutout to openscad!

OpenOffice was dead before it was transferred to Apache, so it’s not old enough to excuse.

That Firefox logo is from 2019. Oracle killed OpenOffice in 2011. Like, they actually completely stopped all work on it. They intentionally killed it at least eight years before this image was made.

It's so that they get goog money

Because they also want to entice new users or appeal to users that for some reason do want that feature. More users means more money and despite being non-profit, people do enjoy having more money. They're not immune. Which is why we need to pull the reigns back every now and then.

get datadumping boy!

remember to scoop the poop after

Mozilla exec compensation aside (relative to other tech CEOs it is pretty low) the reason they do this is because they are trying to make money in some way that isn't the Google search box.

The other thing to consider is that even though a lot of people around here and AI skeptics loads is the general public are not and use it everyday and don't think twice.

I swear the Firefox users have no perspective whenever this stuff comes up.

It's always "why don't they just work on the browser" or " I would pay for just the browser" ( they won't, and even if they did most won't and it won't be enough)

Web browsers don't make money. It's why only chrome basically exists and that's a cost center to support Google's Internet ad hegemony and they spend billions a year on it.

I am watching ladybird and hoping they manage to coalesce the required amount of support to get something off the ground and keep it there.

Boredom mostly, if their lazy bosses worked them more then they wouldn't have time to be productive at home.

/s

What are some of the other functionalities of VLC?

(At least) Half of the contributions to the projects you have there are for-profit. To sell hardware, to sell support licenses, to sell ads, etc.

I agree that it shouldn't be there. LibreOffice is the clear replacement.

All of the ones here are pretty old, so I can believe the meme is over 10 years old with mayve the firefox logo swapped out

It can display video streams, my work uses it to display security cameras so shipping knows when a truck is coming.

Firefox isn't used by the "general public". The general public doesn't give a shit about open-source or which corporate logo is stamped on their copy of Chromium. Many won't even look past Edge, and the rest will likely use Chrome because everyone does already.

No, Firefox is used by the enthusiasts who care about not using Chromium; about actively choosing control over convenience. Now Mozilla Corp is pissing off that same audience by doing what Google does -- shoving AI up everything. To date, every decision regarding AI has met with pushback from their own userbase. Being the lesser evil does not grant them a free pass for every boneheaded decision.

If they need cash, they can fire that fuckwit of a CEO, roll the savings back into their engineers and products, and go on a funding campaign promising to actually improve their products like Mozilla Org Foundation did with Thunderbird.

I've used Photoshop professionally for 20 years and GIMP for about 3 and, to be fair, both of their default interfaces have have their pros and cons. After spending the 2/3 hours it takes to become proficient in one after being used to the other, the comparison mostly comes down to other things e.g availability of tools, raw performance, enshittification etc.

Don't get me wrong, there are some things that annoy me about GIMP (like any software), but I'll be recommending versions 3.0 onwards over Photoshop every time. Adjusting to the interface is easily worth it.

Got any links to learning? Ive gotten pretty far in fusion360 but am trying to transition and found f360 let's me be too lazy or sketch centric/doesn't require parametric rules

It really should be LibreWolf up there instead

They made high quality software...
Until they got a profit incentive.

Also, they’ve vehemently claimed for many years that it’s impractical to provide backward frame-by-frame stepping, but Celluloid does it just fine.

Ah, so that's not just me, is it? That's bugged me for a long time. I was so happy when I discovered SM Player could do it.

LibreOffice just doesn't roll of the tongue like OoenOffice though. Which really sucks. I even catch myself saying it when I mean LibreOffice.

What people don't always remember about FOSS is they are just making it for themselves they are users as well as devs. The great thing about FOSS is if someone else happens to use it that's great and maybe they will contribute to something they use.

Yeah and they get other devs contributing to their project. Nobody's making Firefox or Blender as a solo project, but band together with some other nerds and this is what you get.