We are shutting down Ondsel

Sometimes I envy that although I am not a SWE. I work in a field that is so close with the open source and tech scene that we don't have to rely on commercial products like some other fields. It is hard to compete or gain enough interest in some fields of engineering to any open or free solutions.

Unfortunately, I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions, and really the entire concept of open-source software, and seem to prefer proprietary solutions, the more expensive the better. I've seen this in the software world too, with embedded systems engineers, though Linux, gcc, etc. has made huge inroads here, though it took decades, and mainly came from the Linux adherents pushing downwards into the embedded space from the desktop space, not from any interest by the existing engineers in the embedded space.

Just look, for instance, at FPGAs: almost all the tooling is proprietary, very expensive, and very buggy too. Or look at PCB design: Altium seems to be the standard here still, despite Kicad having made huge advances and by most accounts being as good or even better. It took decades (Kicad started in 1992) for the FOSS alternatives here to really catch on much, and only really because PCBs became cheap enough for hobbyists to design and construct their own (mainly because of Chinese PCB companies), and because CERN contributed some resources.

I'm not sure what the deal is with engineers hating collaboratively-developed and freely-available software, but it's a real thing in my experience. It's like someone told them that FOSS is "socialism" and they just reflexively dismiss or hate it.

> Unfortunately, I've noticed that non-SW engineers frequently turn their noses up at open-source solutions, and really the entire concept of open-source software, and seem to prefer proprietary solutions, the more expensive the better.

Probably because if you complain about bugs or problems in open-source software, a legion of trolls comes to tell you "erm, it's open source, you can just implement it yourself" no matter how skilled the user is at programming.

Like, for example, the lead dev of Inkscape, who used to (not sure if he still does) go around on twitter looking up complaints about how slow Inkscape is on macOS and then complain about them being entitled.

No wonder they don't want to use it, then, if it's considered rude to even expect the software to work.

Yeah, this is a non-trivial effect. It affects FreeCAD too. Mostly contained to the forums, but if you ask a question it's wise to give people who actually know what they're talking about a couple of days to show up.

I think part of it is also the user knowing that they have no right to express frustration when the product is free. That's actually a mental burden. In a sense, people buy software partly so they feel they have the right to complain when it has issues. And honestly I think that's pretty reasonable

No, they do have the right to express frustration. What they don't have is the right to demand work from anyone else, but what tends to happen is that communities are on such a hair trigger for the latter that they reject the former even when the frustration is directly caused by a solvable problem.

Well the thing is, if you buy a product you do have the right to demand work from someone else, and that's why people buy products