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I don't get why this is specifically directed at gratis/free software, though. It's not like commercial software is much better. I spent a lot of time in the beginning of my career punching extremely expensive proprietary software into submission. Things like Solidworks, Autocad, Windows itself, nvidia drivers, various scientific/engineering programs, circuit designing programs, etc.

Tons of extremely expensive licensed software, with expensive support contracts, and we still spent a ton of time and wrote a ton of Perl to punch them into a shape that worked on our very vanilla installs of Windows 7 enterprise. Contacting anyone's support was invariably an absolute fucking joke of an endeavor. We literally only ever did it when we were sick and tired of bashing our heads against their shitty software and wanted to shelf the project for a week or two to recover our sanity while their support "looked into it" and "escalated our ticket" or whatever.

My experience with whether software was more like Stripe or more like a piano sitting on the sidewalk is that it completely depends on the company's attitude. Either they care that people be able to actually use their software, or they don't. I've seen both huge corporate products and small free software projects that both clearly do not care much about whether someone can get their program working easily.

And I've also seen both paid software and free software that care immensely about getting you started and keeping you going.

My experience mirrors yours.

I have never experienced frustration with free/open-source/source-available software like I have with proprietary software.

If I had a dollar for every damned time I was dealing with proprietary software and became frustrated that I just couldn't looked at the source code to figure out what the programmer meant... sigh

When I do contact support I end up taking to people who also don't have source code access. They might have better documentation and a more comprehensive knowledge base, but they're no more equipped to look at the code (and, arguably, probably less equipped to understand the code) than me.

Occasionally I find proprietary software whose accompanying documentation is sufficient to troubleshoot the really bizarre problems w/o source code access. Microsoft's protocol disclosures, created because of the EU anti-trust action, are a good example.

Having source code access and a modicum of reverse engineering and programming knowledge is a game changer for supporting software.

Free software was literally supposed to solve all of these problems. Free access to source magically makes it easy for everyone to contribute bug fixes and (less convincingly...) good documentation.

Of course this rarely happens. Developer/maintainer attitude is one factor, but it's not the only one.

Yes, you are correct. The people who say the "piano" comment was meant just as an observation, not as criticism are wrong. They're ignoring that this was made as an "observation" specifically about free software, with the obvious implication that this is a key difference between "free" software and commercial software. That means: this was not _merely_ an "observation"; it was an observation intended to be a criticism of free software. This is just basic reading and interpretation skills. (Could this interpretation of the comment as a "criticism" be wrong? Of course, but I think that's highly unlikely.)

> "oh, it only works if you install in in X directory...". Sure it sucked to read 3000 forum posts and google things for 2 hours, but, once it worked, it worked.

I had similar problems with proprietary software and I most often ended up with the answer that the thing I want to do just cannot be done. Or sometimes with no answer at all.

I prefer having an option to look up the source code to see what it does, file a bug report or even fix the problem myself than receiving a response "you're an outlier, so we don't care about your problem and there is nothing you can do about it".

So true! No answer, can't be done, or redirected to a sales rep to purchase additional licenses for software that may or may not completely interoperate with the stuff you're already paying them for.

Want to write your own program that extends or interfaces with an open-source software package? It can probably be done with some amount of work, depending on documentation, forums, and readability of the (available!) source code.

Want to do the same with a proprietary software package? Buy the SDK for $X000, there aren't any forums, and the documentation that is basically eyes-only. Maybe a screen-scaper could work, but that would be unreliable and tie up a licensed terminal (not to mention probably violates the EULA!).

For individuals, a lot of it comes down to how you value your time.

The snowblower was not free, you just paid in time rather than money.

There are other costs with not fixing it, but I get your point regarding time.

That said the experience earned and the courage to take on bigger efforts is found through trying and spending time keeping other people's trash out of a landfill.

This is true with software too otherwise we wouldn't have free and open source software.

Right to repair for the win!

https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-get-right-to-repair-passed

> For individuals, a lot of it comes down to how you value your time.

That's why I use open source, I don't have the time to deal with crappy closed source programs

But not everyone's time is valued equally by the market. Yet commercial software has the same price regardless. So yes a lot of time it is more economical to pay in time than money.

I think that the comparison between software and physical goods breaks down a bit in this particular instance.

If you don't have a snowblower, no amount of time spent on your own will allow you to get one - you have to get the physical parts from somewhere.

If you don't have a particular piece of software, you can often write it yourself, with some time, but without paying another person or needing to find a physical good.

As the difficulty of using a piece of software increases, the cost-benefit tradeoff tilts more toward "write it yourself".

Full disclosure, I have a pretty sophisticated home machine shop, so I could have built a lot of a snow blower by hand. OTOH, I have a minimal knowledge of software dev- mostly the cut/paste kind. It is usually easier to start with most of the right parts, though.

I've come to accept that there are certain pieces of imagined software that I could not reasonably expect to write myself, regardless of the amount of time given or my own meager brainpower.

As the difficulty of writing a piece of software (or coordinating the components thereof) increases, the tradeoff invariably tips back toward trying to make somebody else's software work.

This is true in many cases. But in many others, it is the OSS maintainers who are expending the effort responding to the needs of free-software users. Many would argue that companies and adopters of OSS are creating negative externalities for those maintainers, who presumable accept that cost for the sake of their ideals or reputation.