Skip to content

Comment on Sparrow acquired by Googleparent

Comments

Yet more wild-eyed, open source zealotry. No GUI-based F/OSS product has ever achieved the level of polish and usability of things like Sparrow because the people working on open source projects only want to do coding, they don't care about design, bug detection, documentation or, God forbid, user interfaces. If the developers of Sparrow had not been paid for their work, which they ensured by keeping it under their control, it would likely not have happened at all.

I agree with your post so I want to add something which I think was your intent:

* without a corporate "sponsor" entity behind it. (Chromium => Google, etc.)

Yet more wild-eyed, open source zealotry.

No it isn't. I didn't say that F/OSS is universally better than closed source, or anything crazy. I said that F/OSS has one specific advantage over closed-source, proprietary software, and that relates to the ability for a different group to continue development of a project that would otherwise be abandonware. Are you going to argue that this isn't the case?

No GUI-based F/OSS product has ever achieved the level of polish and usability of things like Sparrow because the people working on open source projects only want to do coding, they don't care about design, bug detection, documentation or, God forbid, user interfaces.

That's debatable, but it also has nothing to do with what I said. Yes, F/OSS has a reputation for being weaker on the UI/UX/design front, no one is contesting that, so far as I can see.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.