If a project like that can't make money, there is something seriously wrong with the way FOSS is set up. It's easy to be idealist if you're getting paid by a university, like the guys who thought up FOSS are, but these guys need jobs. There are plenty of other examples, such as roundcube. It beggars belief.

I've been talking about this since 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I have been locked out of an account after not logging in for some time and having moved house in the meantime. For some reason none of the backup options worked either. This was magically resolved after I moved house again.

I've been talking about this for a while now - https://youtu.be/RFA92mXjXLI and it looks like the state guy isn''t going to help much, but the fact is that they're muscling around like the monopolies they are, which isn't good for consumers, innovation, tax income or much of anything except lining their own pockets.

This repository contains the Android client libraries for communicating with Google's Cloud Speech API that are used in Live Transcribe.[...] The libraries provided are nearly identical to those running in the production application Live Transcribe. They have been extensively field tested and unit tested. However, the tests themselves are not open sourced at this time. Agreed, it's a scam.

Many open source projects are struggling to stay viable, loads are underfunded, understaffed and overstressed (eg Roundcube and sabredav). Most of what the big companies put online is incomplete, old and unmaintained. They hope that this kind of stuff will act as a gateway drug to their propreitary offerings. The big companies are forking projects and taking them over (yay! free software!) and then turning the updates into payed modules. I'd say the open source world is in disarray, especially if you consider that the complexity of projects is growing like crazy and the FOSS community people act like beggars by selling t-shirts to get some sort of funding because the FOSS fundamentalists refuse to think of making money using open source - usually a very easy stance for them to take, considering they are on a payroll. I discuss this in a bit more detail in my talk Open Source XOR Money https://youtu.be/inGz92AHjwo

https://www.linkielist.com/glo... “All of us are jacked into this system,” he said. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.” Aza Raskin on Google Search Results and How He Invented the Infinite Scroll Social media apps are ‘deliberately’ addictive to users Social media companies are deliberately addicting users to their products for financial gain, Silicon Valley insiders have told the BBC’s Panorama programme. “It’s as if they’re taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that’s the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back”, said former Mozilla and Jawbone employee Aza Raskin. “Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting” he added. In 2006 Mr Raskin, a leading technology engineer himself, designed infinite scroll, one of the features of many apps that is now seen as highly habit forming. At the time, he was working for Humanized – a computer user-interface consultancy. Image caption Aza Raskin says he did not recognise how addictive infinite scroll could be Infinite scroll allows users to endlessly swipe down through content without clicking. “If you don’t give your brain time to catch up with your impulses,” Mr Raskin said, “you just keep scrolling.” He said the innovation kept users looking at their phones far longer than necessary. Mr Raskin said he had not set out to addict people and now felt guilty about it.

I've been giving talks about this since 2017 as the crisis has been obvious for ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... And as soon as you try to talk to many Open Source advocates about ways to make money they go all hardcore oldschool and refer to definitions made decades ago. It's easy to give stuff away for free, if you're an academic and your salary is being paid for anyway. It's easy to give stuff away for free if the code and user base is small, but many FOSS projects nowadays are huge, with loads of users, coders and stress to fix up bugs whilst large companies come along and make huge $$$ off your efforts and you make nothing. Look at the install bases of Roundcube, Debian, LibreOffice - all great projects reduced to begging for donations and selling t-shirts at the FOSSDEM, whilst their install bases is in the millions and loads of companies are making serious bank for offering this software. Look at how companies like Amazon and Google come and fork software and then make it proprietary after a while. The system is broken. My solution is to say fine, you can install it 10 or 100 or 1000 times and after that you must be making money from it, so then you need to pay license fees for it.

Not only do the maintainers lose, but so do the consumers - we don't all work for universities and get paid to develop FOSS. And when everyone goes into meltdown the quality of the software goes to pot and important projects die. Have a look how many FOSS projects are used in Android and IOS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... My 2017 talk Open Source XOR Money