Free and Open Source Software

17957 readers

133 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Gaywallet@beehaw.org

alyaza@beehaw.org

132

Ladybird web browser now funded by GitHub co-founder, promises ‘no code’ from rivals (devclass.com)

submitted 4 months ago by Recant@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

160 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Vodulas@beehaw.org 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?

[–] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That would depend on the feature set

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Read it again...

[–] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I refuse to believe there exist two pieces of software that are truly for all intents and purposes identical, unless one is a very recent fork of the other.

Both Lemmy and Ladybird are very pointedly not forks of anything.

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Which is unrelated to their point, which is that visible popularity of a piece of software (e.g. having many downloads in an app store) has a large impact on likelihood of people to trust it.

You feigning ignorance at this just discredits your own position. Their question was essentially rhetorical, and you chose to answer it incorrectly rather than concede their correct point:

If you encountered 2 identical pieces of software, you would trust the one that is more popular, thus proving that popularity is a meaningful benefit to a piece of software.

[–] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Of course not. I would do my research, like any responsible consumer.

I'm a programmer. Which libraries I pick to add to my project have effects on everyone who will use the software I publish. I owe it to them to do my homework to compare them and figure out what the differences are and which one is better for my use case. If I just picked whichever one was most popular, I could have a polyfill.io incident on my hands every week.

I do the same thing with software I personally use, because I'm a responsible consumer. Firefox and Chrome aren't identical. Chrome has way more downloads but I'm betting more than half the people in this thread use Firefox or one of its derivatives, like Mull or Librewolf.

I dream of a world where doing your homework when choosing software to learn is not so rare that people assume no one does, and accuse those who do of lying.

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I dream of a world where doing your homework when choosing software to learn is not so rare

But when it comes to most people out there, we're not in that world right now, and popularity does matter, so boosting shitty devs' products is harmful to the FOSS ecosystem. HTH

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 months ago

I mean, you can deny the premise all day long, but it will never win you an argument.