Using Lemmy without donating to the developers does not send support to them. Same goes for Ladybird, does it not?
Adding to popularity does support them.
you're kidding, right?
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
That would depend on the feature set
Read it again...
I refuse to believe there exist two pieces of software that are truly for all intents and purposes identical, unless one is a very recent fork of the other.
Both Lemmy and Ladybird are very pointedly not forks of anything.
Which is unrelated to their point, which is that visible popularity of a piece of software (e.g. having many downloads in an app store) has a large impact on likelihood of people to trust it.
You feigning ignorance at this just discredits your own position. Their question was essentially rhetorical, and you chose to answer it incorrectly rather than concede their correct point:
If you encountered 2 identical pieces of software, you would trust the one that is more popular, thus proving that popularity is a meaningful benefit to a piece of software.
Of course not. I would do my research, like any responsible consumer.
I'm a programmer. Which libraries I pick to add to my project have effects on everyone who will use the software I publish. I owe it to them to do my homework to compare them and figure out what the differences are and which one is better for my use case. If I just picked whichever one was most popular, I could have a polyfill.io incident on my hands every week.
I do the same thing with software I personally use, because I'm a responsible consumer. Firefox and Chrome aren't identical. Chrome has way more downloads but I'm betting more than half the people in this thread use Firefox or one of its derivatives, like Mull or Librewolf.
I dream of a world where doing your homework when choosing software to learn is not so rare that people assume no one does, and accuse those who do of lying.
I dream of a world where doing your homework when choosing software to learn is not so rare
But when it comes to most people out there, we're not in that world right now, and popularity does matter, so boosting shitty devs' products is harmful to the FOSS ecosystem. HTH
I mean, you can deny the premise all day long, but it will never win you an argument.
I guess that's true when you're a company trying to sell a product. For an open source project more popularity might just mean more hassle. Sure, it may increase your employment opportunities somewhat, but seeing how entitled and demanding users of os-software can be, I'm sure some devs wish their projects were less popular.
Yeah, it EMOTIONALLY supports them. Dude. It's okay. It also supports the users who get value out of it in actual material ways.
A. Not a "dude"
B. I'll pose the same rhetorical as I did to the other person that didn't think popularity was support:
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
A. Not a “dude”
I so don't care, my dude. Why bother responding at all when you completely ignored my very simple point.
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
They are identical pieces of open source software. By definition, it does not matter which one I choose, they will both perform identically. But if I do happen to choose the one with people you don't like, it still doesn't "support" them in any meaningful way, and certainly does not "support" the specific things about them that you object to. Your rhetoric is mere sophistry intended to muddy the waters.
Open source software isn't owned by anyone. It doesn't somehow bring bounty to its creators, it improves the lives of everyone without prejudice. It expands all human culture and potential. Even people you don't like. Tough. Deal with it.
Don't like it? Fork the project, purge all the names that upset you, and release it under a new name. Yay! Now everyone is supporting YOU!!
Using Lemmy without donating to the developers does not send support to them. Same goes for Ladybird, does it not?
Adding to popularity does support them.
you're kidding, right?
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
That would depend on the feature set
Read it again...
I refuse to believe there exist two pieces of software that are truly for all intents and purposes identical, unless one is a very recent fork of the other.
Both Lemmy and Ladybird are very pointedly not forks of anything.
Which is unrelated to their point, which is that visible popularity of a piece of software (e.g. having many downloads in an app store) has a large impact on likelihood of people to trust it.
You feigning ignorance at this just discredits your own position. Their question was essentially rhetorical, and you chose to answer it incorrectly rather than concede their correct point:
If you encountered 2 identical pieces of software, you would trust the one that is more popular, thus proving that popularity is a meaningful benefit to a piece of software.
Of course not. I would do my research, like any responsible consumer.
I'm a programmer. Which libraries I pick to add to my project have effects on everyone who will use the software I publish. I owe it to them to do my homework to compare them and figure out what the differences are and which one is better for my use case. If I just picked whichever one was most popular, I could have a polyfill.io incident on my hands every week.
I do the same thing with software I personally use, because I'm a responsible consumer. Firefox and Chrome aren't identical. Chrome has way more downloads but I'm betting more than half the people in this thread use Firefox or one of its derivatives, like Mull or Librewolf.
I dream of a world where doing your homework when choosing software to learn is not so rare that people assume no one does, and accuse those who do of lying.
But when it comes to most people out there, we're not in that world right now, and popularity does matter, so boosting shitty devs' products is harmful to the FOSS ecosystem. HTH
I mean, you can deny the premise all day long, but it will never win you an argument.
I guess that's true when you're a company trying to sell a product. For an open source project more popularity might just mean more hassle. Sure, it may increase your employment opportunities somewhat, but seeing how entitled and demanding users of os-software can be, I'm sure some devs wish their projects were less popular.
Yeah, it EMOTIONALLY supports them. Dude. It's okay. It also supports the users who get value out of it in actual material ways.
A. Not a "dude"
B. I'll pose the same rhetorical as I did to the other person that didn't think popularity was support:
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
I so don't care, my dude. Why bother responding at all when you completely ignored my very simple point.
They are identical pieces of open source software. By definition, it does not matter which one I choose, they will both perform identically. But if I do happen to choose the one with people you don't like, it still doesn't "support" them in any meaningful way, and certainly does not "support" the specific things about them that you object to. Your rhetoric is mere sophistry intended to muddy the waters.
Open source software isn't owned by anyone. It doesn't somehow bring bounty to its creators, it improves the lives of everyone without prejudice. It expands all human culture and potential. Even people you don't like. Tough. Deal with it.
Don't like it? Fork the project, purge all the names that upset you, and release it under a new name. Yay! Now everyone is supporting YOU!!