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Comment by inflatableDodo | Hacker News Reader

>But nobody is going to. Because it makes no business sense to do so.

I've got Blender open on my desktop. Could you explain the business sense behind Blender exisiting?

Interest? Very few people care to build medical billing software or crms for free in their spare time. So you get products that aren't as good. Even with blender, there's far better paid tools because people need money to live, so they put their efforts into things that make money.

I thought blender was used by commercial producers (3D modelling, animation, NLE), if there are better things, for them, then why do they use blender?

You might say "price" but then that's part of being better "better excluding financial considerations" is quite a different notion.

Companies weigh the benefit of open source for their needs against non open source products.

A limited list of reasons they may use it include available talent (people often learn on free stuff), availability of support and consultants locally or at their price, specfic features of one tool need or not needed, availability of developers to contribute/fix bugs, desire to have input handled openly and open governed. They prefer the UI or APIs. Flexibility to integrate more openly. Desire to make a statement in support of FOSS or specific project.

Reasons why they may not us FOSS, liability (someone to blame if there's an issue, spread insurance costs), privacy when dealing with issues, availability of consultants or training at the desired price, availability of talent (many people learn paid software at school), availability of managed server farms. They prefer the UI or APIs. Available APIs that have simple integrations. Etc.

Blender Institute, the main source of programmers of Blender, is a non-profit organization that pays people real money. As a user of 3D software, your statement about "far better paid tools" is inaccurate this day and age.

I read the example of Blender as an example of one of many open source solutions.

I sort of meant the copy of blender I have open. But that's cool, it sort of illuminates the other weird discussion I am in. Unless I have put the sarcasm on with a trowel, I am otherwise usually pretty literal and often get confused by people telling me what I meant to say and what others meant to say. I'm not entirely sure this practice of projecting adjustments, while common, is all that well rooted in reality.

I too have issues with people grasping my language. I think it's a common thing these days. I feel like I have to be overly verbose for anyone to understand me. Else they just think I'm dumb or rude. I try to use winky faces ;) when sarcasm is text only. Perhaps we need a Font Typeface for sarcasm..?

This is the other reason to lay it on with a trowel. In speech I can be more subtle with sarcasm, online I hate the use of '/s' tags, so I flag it more by including surreal or ridiculous elements and making sharp changes in style.

I am autistic. I tend to get stuck in reading something in the context I was already thinking in.

Fair, I do that a bit too. If people need me to focus, I then tend to change gears slowly. Some managers bizarrely see this as a training opportunity and like to switch what I am doing several times a day against my protestations that it is probably a bad idea if they want to get good work out of me.

Companies/Content producers that do not want to depend on a single vendor, or want to avoid the lock-in, and went on to support an open alternative?

Makes perfect business sense.

Well, they open sourced it as a bit of a gamble when it became apparent that they couldn't afford the programmers to run it profitably as a business, but if I squint I can see where you are coming from. OK, here's a harder one. Explain the business case for TempleOS.

TempleOS was never a business, and it never was significant part of any kind of software market and completely irrelevant in terms of economic value.

I guess you are hung up on the fact that OP used hyperbole to say that "nobody" is going to focus on local-first software and you are trying to win an argument by taking this statement literally.

Can we be a little bit more charitable here, and actually argue the point of OP? Even though I am a die-hard Linux-on-desktop, Thunderbird-for-gmail, SaaS-averse gray-hairing dude who still is bent on spending countless nights and weekends setting up my own self-hosted services on my own bare-metal servers, I totally understand that the growing of SaaS-companies are due to economic reasons, not technical ones.

It is not like people are going around saying "Gee, I made this software here and I wish people could run on their computers, but they can't so I will have to create a startup business that runs this software on the internet and I will collect subscriptions as a way to fund the operation".

>I guess you are hung up on the fact that OP used hyperbole to say that "nobody" is going to focus on local-first software and you are trying to win an argument by taking this statement literally.

Well, I was mainly responding to the closing paragraph.

>So yeah, sure, if you were to build a piece of desktop software from a clean sheet of paper today, this is a really good guide on how to do that. But nobody is going to. Because it makes no business sense to do so.

I could be more charitable and invent other things that I think they meant to say rather than focus on what they said. You are not the first to suggest it is a failing of mine that I do not do this.

Personally I think that if someone says say "But nobody is going to. Because it makes no business sense to do so.", it is reasonable to point out that there are plenty of motivations beyond 'business sense', and to point this out is fair comment, rather than getting hung up on anything.

You just used 103 words (541 characters) to basically confirm that your reply is just one "Well, actually...". This makes a discussion forum extremely annoying and makes me regret wasting all this time writing for you.

If I am not the first one to point out your failure of understanding the Principle of Charity, do us all a favor and focus on that before continuing discussion with others online.

I understand the principle, I just think the principle of charity is more misused than not. Also, you didn't waste time writing for me. You probably did waste time counting the words in my reply though. Sorry to have annoyed you, perhaps you are taking me too literally and it might help if you imagined a version of what I said that is more pleasing.

If you truly think such a principle can be "misused", then you really haven't understood it.

Really? I could have sworn that there were a whole host of techniques within the field of political rhetoric that could quite easily be relabelled; "Many interesting ways to misuse 'The Principle of Charity'".

The point at which I start to think it might be being misused is when it is not being used to look for a more gentle version of what could be unintentional ambiguity, but rather is being used to change meaning from the literal sense of a sentence to something in favor of a current position in a discussion, as this invites people to try and have their cake and eat it.

Yeah, either you really don't understand it or you are full-on bullshit mode to avoid conceding that your only objection to the OP was based on your misinterpretation of an hyperbole...

When using 'nobody' as hyperbole, it is generally used to mean 'very few', though some people also use it to mean 'nobody important', with themselves acting as judge of what, or who is important. One reason I feel free to treat the statement somewhat literally is that I am already including the hyperbole. It doesn't change my point if we shift from 'nobody' to 'very few', or 'nobody important'. There is a hell of a lot of stuff that people do that makes pretty much no business sense, or only ends up making some sort of rather inefficient business sense by accident because someone is trying to justify the fact that someone built it. There are wide open fields of this kind of stuff. A surprisingly large amount of it is in business.

Honestly, you still arguing over the meaning of nobody sort of indicates that either you don't want to get the point from OP or you just want to nitpick.

If it makes it easier for you, forget the "nobody" paragraph or substitute for "a very tiny minority compared to the total population of people/companies that make software for a living".

With this in mind, think of how many companies would actually benefit from focusing on "data used by the software is local-first" vs "the software should get things done faster/help the user make more money/help the user get laid"?

If you actually argue that companies in fact would benefit from focusing on this but can not due to some technical limitation, then we would have a legitimate point of discussion. But it seems you can't, so all I am getting from you is this insipid argument over semantics.

It would be great if we could actually get to the point of OP after all this time. How about we try doing that?

(The same could work from the demand-side of the equation as well. If you argue there is a significant amount of the population of software users that say are more concerned about the software "to be local-data first" than "the software must help me do my job faster/make me more money/get laid tonight", then you have a point. And no, pointing out to Richard Stallman and saying "well, actually there is this guy and a bunch of other aspies that don't care about getting laid or more money" is not really a valid refutation of OP's point)

>If it makes it easier for you, forget the "nobody" paragraph or substitute for "a very tiny minority compared to the total population of people/companies that make software for a living".

I did just do that in my previous post and noted that my point does not change, but hey, please go right ahead and keep telling me what point I should be discussing and what it is that others meant to say.

The flip side of being a charitable reader is that a writer should also behave decently; that involves trying to be maximally accurate about claims and factual statements one communicates. "Well, actually" comments are justified if the author failed at their duty, and welcome in honest discourse.

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