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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

> Typical users do not have the same motivations as programmers.

This is actually very untrue in my experience. I can't tell you how many "normal users" ask me whether there is an open source equivalent they can use so they don't have to pay for X, for example, and many have shown interest in doing what they can to optimize their setup and/or reduce their financial burden by getting smarter about how things are set up.

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I don’t think users intrinsically care about open source, what they want is free. If it’s closed source then that’s probably ok too.

Oooh anecdata time; I can’t tell you how many times software engineers have just put libs in a dep file to avoid recreating the wheel.

Reusing existing software is not equivalent to expecting users who want share pics to learn from 8088 on up. In fact it’s quite the opposite; it’s good engineering to not waste time recreating the wheel.

> I can't tell you how many "normal users" ask me whether there is an open source equivalent they can use so they don't have to pay for X

I don't think I've ever had a non-dev ask me about "open source". Asking for free alternatives, sure, but it's very rare that I'd recommend open source alternatives for whatever normal people are doing.

I've had many people come to me asking for "that open source office thing instead of word"

Have you really? I worked in an org full of fairly technical non-devs and never had someone ask that. Mostly because corporations usually have no problem paying for Word... and google docs exists.

Thinking about the motivation of programmers. Some programmer did make the changes to limit AirDrop... Like there is a room in a meat factory where animals go in alive and come out dead. Who was that and to what extent is he responsible?

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