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Well, from my POV, the licensing part of this is only a small part of the puzzle. Open source software that’s insanely complex to run and is developed like industrial software still doesn’t make it amenable for home cooking / barefoot use.

The bigger limiter is the missing culture of deliberately small and individualized software to specific people, families, or small communities. That’s the mindset Maggie is trying to espouse. Then, you can carve that space into closed vs open source, free vs paid, etc.

But Excel and Notion aren’t open source and people have gotten really good at using them for these home cooked meals.

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Open source is the natural conclusion of "barefoot development".

Sure, now a days there are lots of big professional projects, but the core of open source/Free software, is people making stuff for themselves and their neighbours.

Linux didn't start with the goal of taking over the world. It started as one guy's amateur project.

Only if people would start using OSS projects that are out there for them for free and contribute (where contribute means, using, supporting, adding to documentation) it would be solved already.

You know there is libre office, there are tons of other OSS apps - accounting, CAD, image manipulation.

Whole idea that people somehow need to be developers is crooked and making it worse. There are tons of already useful local first software rotting out there - only because „everyone uses Photoshop” „everyone uses Excel”.

I don’t agree with „barefoot developers” - it should be „OSS promoters” that promote open standards and open applications and not come build up each and every piece of software by reinventing the wheel.

I as a developer don’t need to make every app for myself - 99% of my needs for software in personal life is covered by excel and 1% is communication apps that cannot be local and someone has to run server anyway.

Exactly. Licensing is the easy part. Deploy + run are the hard parts, IMO.

You can build something amazing like Immich, a shining example of open-source software that, after a lot of setup, "just works"....until the next release wants you to make well-informed decisions to your `docker-compose.yaml` file.

My wife, who likes Immich but has no interest in learning to code, is not going to do those things if I get hit by a bus, because she won't know how. She's gonna give up and just go with paying some service for photo storage, or else losing photos like everyone else.

There's a lot of complexity to software and you either learn how it works or find someone that does. And it's not a tangible item like a car, where you can intuit your way around.

But I much prefer to host something locally and give my family access than letting them suffer the whims of big tech.

More than just a license, free and open source is about us leveraging each other's effort for problems deemed too unprofitable for major companies. It’s required for the authors solution to scale but they don’t mention it.