After watching the “I Made a Personal VPN to Access EVERYTHING… and You Can Too!” video I was recommended this one by “Technically Unsure”.
I found it interesting especially in the light of the YouTube drama over the last few weeks and because it shows just how devious some of these free applications are.
If it is free, you are the product.
That’s one of the reasons that I’ve started to pay for software that I use. (Prior to that was morality. But with choosing a VPN? Definitely the desire to not be the VPN endpoint for someone else.)
Sorry I can’t watch a talking hands video
Things like Tailscale make sense. It costs them miniscule amounts of server usage, and the overlap between homelabbers and senior infrastructure engineers who could vouch for Tailscale for their company is probably not too small. They’d also probably not earn much at all if their customer service was paid anyways
Unfortunately the old days of freeware are over. Firefox, VLC, Wikipedia are bastions of a day gone bye. Corporate greed ruins everything.
If it is free, you are the product
This sentence should fuck all the way off. There are too many examples of this being false, to just use it as a blanket statement.
Loss-leading products have been a thing forever - it’s why almost every remote-access software has a free version - they want people with influence over enterprise budgets to see how good it is.
Excuse me, what are you talking about? Open source software is thriving better than ever.
I roll my eyes at this line too. There’s various FOSS options. And there are plenty of examples where you pay for a service and become even more of a product.
Facebook is free.
Reddit is free.
Those random VPN services that use your IP as an endpoint is free.
In each, you’re used.
Also like what’s your problem? There are other ways to disagree without cussing someone out. You are breaking Rule #2.
“thriving better than ever” ok. Prove me wrong. What is some newly developed open source software that’s designed for more than one dudes random GitHub page?
Yes, and I can give you three examples where you’re not used, which makes it a bad blanket statement.
I’m not cussing you out. I’m telling you that the saying should fuck off.
Timescaledb
Payara
Postgresql
Home assistant
Blender
Libre office
VLC media player
Linux
KeePass
Gimp
…
are you kidding? Open source software runs the world, go ask chatgpt, it gave me a billion examples that you can google and verify of successful projects
Docker
TrueNAS
HomeAssistant & Every other free smarthome integration.
Jellyfin.
The world runs on free software and infrastructure in form of KVM, Kubernetes, MariaDB/Postgres, Redis/Valkey
A million ton frameworks.
Please send a list of all the software you use on a day to day basis.
Oh and by the way, EVERY SINGLE FREE APP ON YOUR PHONE
No, man. You can’t attack sentences, when you attempt that you attack the person who wrote it.
Please find a better way to communicate. Your argument loses out because of it.
And… you didn’t actually give any examples.
Although I agree with your point, most of these are not exactly “newly developed”, as they asked for.
Gimp, VLC, Linux, libre office (fork from OpenOffice), blender, postgresql, and keepass are all at least 20+ years old. Of your list only home assistant, timescaldb, and payara are the only ones that are less than 10 years old. Of those the only one that has a modicum of wide adoption by end users would be home assistant.
This is entirely my point, which I think you are missing. I literally said VLC as an example of a bastion of a by gone era. The corner stone software of open source are almost all software first released more than 2 decades ago.
You say it’s thriving but look at Firefox or VLC. As the growth of devices have increased, they have actually seen a decrease in adoption. And what are they replaced with? Commercial software.
Trust me, I wish this wasn’t the case, but until there is a societal shift, this won’t be changing anytime soon. We’ve long left the era of the Internet being for the hobbies and the passionate, we are in the era of corporate greed and consumerism.
Not open source. Just open-weight and open-method
Sure I can attack sentences. I’m saying that the sentence is bad. I’m not saying that you are bad.
your argument loses out because of it
The point remains regardless of how I word it. My argument doesn’t lose out, because you’re offended that I think it’s stupid.
examples
Okay, sure:
Tailscale
Bitwarden
Literally the majority of open source projects. Feel free to look up examples yourself, but here’s few: LibreOffice, KeePass (and forks), Linux (the kernel), a ton of Linux distros, VLC, GIMP