And Linux/BSD are so good proprietary developers rip them off to whatever degree legally permissible.

Blender had a reeeeaaally long way though, I remember a time where Blender was quite big already but Maya just was miles ahead in terms of usability. Nowadays they are not only even, Blender is probably used more often since it's not only free but more people know how to use it than Maya

And Firefox, git, Dia, gimp, etc...

Proprietary OS's like Windows and macOS lack package managers too that tools like chocolatey and homebrew provide.

“What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”

Counterpoint: 'The Brooks's Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.'

Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s05.html

Wait wait wait... RiF ain't dead?!

Same for Apollo and now Voyager. Probably the best-designed and -implemented apps I’ve ever used.

Wait RIF was reanimated? In what way?

That's why the no warranty clause is by far the most important in any license granting access to the public

For real. I just spent a decade in academia working dog hours with little pay keeping services running wondering how the true devs and sysadmins do it.

I recently switched to the corporate world and have peeked behind curtain of competency: headless chickens running around, patching failing products rather than spending time to properly fix them because immediate results are the only metric that counts.

Stability, scalability, reproducibility? Forget it, that's someone else's problem apparently.

CAD Software?

Well, sometimes it happens. Lemmy was semi-broken during the APIocalypse, and there still isn't such a thing as a FOSS Facebook, or search engine backend for that matter.

Minetest*

I follow the 80/20 rule recursively. as soon as I've gotten 80% of the way there for 20% effort I immediately stop, and start a brand new project for the remaining 20%. Bam! 96% complete for only 24% effort.

taps forehead

well, most as in numerically, technically yes :D

yes and they either become popular because of their usefulness and get organized like firefox/mozilla or they get co-opted by corporations and invariably enshitified like chrome/chromium

There is a very large corpus of FLOSS software out there serving everything from individual itches to whole industries. Any project that is important to someone's bottom line is likely to have paid developers working on it but often alongside hobbyists.

The project I predominately work on is about 90% paid developers but from lots of different companies and organisations. Practically though the developers don't care about the affiliation of the other developers they work with but the ideas and patches they bring to the project.