Eric Murphy trying to explain free software

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Eric Murphy explains to his 88.7K subscribers Why Are Open Source Alternatives So Bad?. I didn’t listen until the end.

Eric, you say that “Most people working on free software products are developers” who aren’t good at “much else” than programming (6:42 ff). Yes, most people, including you and me, aren’t good at much else than a few things.

On one hand you have free software products maintained by a few volunteer programmers during their spare time, and on the other hand you have products maintained by hundreds or even thousands of professionals, ranging from programmers over designers, QA experts, salespeople and aforementioned academics.

Isn’t it amazing that the results of these two utterly different approaches lead to results that are so close to each other that we are tempted to compare them? A few programmers, just out of love, manage to create something that is comparable to a product created by thousands of professionals!

And rather than feeling awe in front of this miracle, Eric, you complain that Gimp is not as good as Photoshop. You call it a mere “hobby” when people invest their time out of love for a project, and you call it “professional” when people sell their time to a greedy giant. Doesn’t this sound absurd?

Yes, free software is being maintained by people who love their work. And yes, software development is much more than writing code. Big software companies even pay top-level academics to observe end users in order to optimize the user interface, or to train programmers in order to optimize their efficiency, or to talk to politicians in order to change some law. And yes, designing, optimizing, testing and selling software are boring tasks compared to writing code.

Yes, Eric, you say that the problem with free software is that there is no organization that cares for it.

And I say that this problem is not the problem of free software, it is our problem. The problem is that we still use proprietary software at all. Proprietary software is being developed by corporations whose main purpose is to maximize their profit. The fact that proprietary software is more user-friendly is just a side-effect of their purpose. This is a catastrophic situation because owning the source code means owning the power. Many important parts of our IT infrastructure depends on the good will of a few deciders who live in a country that’s potentially about to turn into a rogue state.

Yes it’s true that money is the only real argument because humans need to satisfy their basic needs. We won’t get “hobby” software projects working as user-friendly as “professional” products as long as the money we are ready to pay for it goes into the wrong pockets. The question is whom to pay, whom to assign ownership of the knowledge that is stored in source code as the fruit of software development work. Right now this knowledge is owned by the few corporate owners who were smart or lucky enough to buy the right shares and who happened to be among the winners of the market fluctuations. If we want to get out of this there is no other way than to subdue the greedy giants.