Selfhosted

All the FOSS offerings I can think of that are "too big to fail" have big corporate support

....

businesses don't have that luxury. That's why they use proprietary software.

Youre missing a few key things here.

• TONS of proprietary applications go years without work or effort
• TONS of proprietary applications/solutions get abandoned, leaving businesses and consumers to scramble for a solution.
• If the business relies on open source, they can contribute to that project.
• An open source solution also means continuity and the ability to fork when abandoned, proprietary solutions that are abandoned are just gone.

I wouldn't put much agreement toward your argument for proprietary here, because I've seen (and had to deal with) proprietary solutions being abandoned with no workable solution available, especially as the current generation of proprietary solutions require a license server or other cloud-connected back end in order to work.

So when they get abandoned, its just over.

So no, this argument against open source for business has no merits IMO.

This isn't exclusive to Open Source projects. This happens all the time with proprietary apps as well: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Even things like TV shows can get killed after 1 season.

I'm guessing most of us are self-hosting as a hobby, and we can afford to risk a loss of support when a project is abandoned, but businesses don't have that luxury. That's why they use proprietary software.

Perhaps an org whose income depends on foss should sponsor those products? Just like they pay big tech for shitty services.

but businesses don’t have that luxury. That’s why they use proprietary software

Wait, that doesn't match my business experience. Those proprietary solutions are usually a collection of open source libraries and DBs and Elasticserach or Redis and whatever running Linux VMs held together with duct tape and a small amount of proprietary application code (compared to everything else) using five different open source frameworks.

Or if you buy, say, a Lasercutter, how do you think they convert the images you prepare for engraving? Their own commercial libraries they bought from someone? Because businesses don't do open source? Nope. How do you think businesses compile the firmware that goes into their CNC machine? Borland C++? Nope.

When you use the proprietary software, they don't tell you what went into it. That's kind of the point - you are buying a solution and only want to know the price. When you host your own instead, you kind of need to know what goes into it, because you didn't pay someone to do the integration for you.

Or more fundamentally: with open source, you only get what the developer wanted to build. If you want someone to build what you need, you got to be either lucky that the two things align close enough, or find a way to pay someone to focus on your needs instead of theirs. Or you can hope someone else pays someone to make it and then pays a little bit extra to also publish it open source for everyone else to use. Rarely happens, but it does happen.

It's already been said: FOSS projects can be abandoned, but resurrected via forks and re-writes, whereas proprietary apps are simply dead with no recourse unless the original dev/team releases the source code.

That being said, I am not a developer, so when a project dies, I am at the behest of other devs to revive the project. I do find that projects that many people value, like all the recent discord alternatives or health/money management apps, tend to survive longer because they provide value to a wide range of people. Things like wikis or new protocols are far more niche, so I am not surprised that they might not outlive projects like sharkord or rackula.

Installing a program on discover store with 0 reviews seems sketchy

Complex social hierarchy is a super important aspect to account for too. In the proprietary software realm, you infer confidence in the accumulated wealth hierarchy. In FOSS the hierarchy is not wealth, but reputation like in academia or the film industry. If some company in Oman makes some really great proprietary app, are you going to build your European startup over top of it? Likewise, if in FOSS someone with no reputation makes some killer app, the first question to ask is whether this is going to anchor or support a stellar reputation. Maybe they are just showing off skills to land a job. If that is the case, they are just like startups that are only looking to get bought up quickly by some bigger fish. We are all conditioned to think in terms of horded wealth as the only form of hierarchy, but that is primitive. If all the wealth was gone, humans are still fundamentally complex social animals, and will always establish a complex hierarchy. This is one of the spaces where it is different.

I really enjoyed Gifable, a self-hosted gif library. It was great, albeit a bit feature light. About 3 years ago the maintainer stopped maintaining and went AFK, nothing to be heard of then. I've since forked it, and I've been working on some new features to hopefully bring it up to speed. (Things like S3 storage, using AI image captioning to auto-caption your memes, categories, and hopefully full matrix integration), but it's a slog.

It can be frustrating looking for the current best alternative. Ive found alternativeto.net to be really good at finding all the alternatives and telling you which are worth a look.

With my own projects, maybe 1 in 10 make it to that kind of "ready to publish" beta quality, and most get abandoned thereafter.

Iys not really because im short on money as such. Its because im just playing around with whatever project, and quickly lose interest once it reaches that "almost kinda done" state.

I dont really see this as a shortcoming of the FOSS ecosystem.