Why 'free' proprietary software will always end in tears
Why 'free' proprietary software will always end in tears
Nearly every day, my kids come home from school and go on about some new app or game they and their mates are excited about.
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Note that this specifically talks about proprietary platforms. Locally-run proprietary freeware has entirely different potential issues, mostly centered around the developer stopping to maintain it. Locally-run F/OSS has similar issues, actually, but lessened by the fact that someone might later pick up the project and continue it.
Admittedly, platforms are very common these days because
the web is an easily accessible cross-platform GUI toolkitSaaS is more easily monetized.Everything eventually dies off, or transforms into something not serving our needs and the legacy version dies off; free, paid, proprietary or open source, doesn’t matter. The only thing we can do is position ourselves in such a way that when it happens, not if, we are ready to take what we’d need to the next solution that will serve our needs.
The issue is they can install spyware after selling their company and if you have automatic updates you'll get that too
True, although that has happened with F/OSS as well (like with xz or the couple times people put Bitcoin miners into npm packages). In either case it's a lot less likely than the software simply ceasing to be supported, becoming gradually incompatible with newer systems, and rotting away.
Except, of course, that I can pick up the decade-old corpse of an open source project and try to make it work on modern systems, despite how painful it is to try to get a JavaFX application written for Java 7 and an ancient version of Gradle to even compile with a recent JDK. (And then finally give up and just run the last Windows release with its bundled JRE in Wine. But in theory I could've made it work!)