> passionate losers
This is unduly meanspirited. Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser.
I have zero interest in the Win11 UI, and am even on board with the cynical view that this is purely a bean counter cost savings for MS rather than some benevolent outreach.
But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.
> Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser.
Not OP but I understood this as "contributing for free to a project owned by a corporation worth more money than you could realistically spend in a lifetime is what makes you a loser".
what if that contribution benefits me personally in any way whatsoever?
That is the self-interested feeling that Open Source preys on.
And I do mean "prey" with a negative connotation. One of the biggest perks of Open Source from a company's perspective is that you can get developers to work on your project for free without paying them. However, those same developers have very little say in the direction of your product, and any forking of your project would have to compete the economies of scale that come from being a company. The only downside is that you have to worry about being out-scaled by a bigger company, as the developers of ElasticSearch, Redis, Docker, and others found out first-hand.
This is distinct from Free Software, which has different dynamics that are much more friendly to mutual benefit, collaboration, and forking, especially if there's no CLA that pools all of the copyright into one corporate or non-profit entity. But then again, this sort of Free Software moralizing is expressly the reason why Open Source was created as an alternative in the first place. The OSI even used to admit as such on their website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...
That’s great for you, but don’t underestimate the asymmetric value here. You’re giving them free labour, and they get _way more_ out of that than you do - especially in aggregate.
And? If I get value, I get value. If someone else gets MORE value, that doesn't diminish the value _I_ get.
Viewing ones gains only through the lens of how it affects others seems like a hard way to live.
You need to ask OP, I don't know what they meant, just how I personally understood it.
> I have zero interest in the Win11 UI [...]
As has the rest of the world, and we will just put it on the list of UI frameworks Microsoft did not completly implement, fully support or considering "the default".
So we stay stuck with the status quo: There's no official UI for Windows, still.
There is Win32, that has made us company for several decades, is kind of ok, definitely much better than Motif, the official UI for much UNIXes, before Linux took over.
In Motif, i can set the shadowThickness as much as i want. /s
I rather not deal with Xlib C API.
I mean, Apple gets a lot of flak for changing things and deprecating old frameworks, but I’ve lost count of the number of post-win32 UI frameworks?
Thanks for calling it out. I get OPs passionate disdain for Microsoft but one must remember that the world is built on contributions from such people. Take the whole Linux and GNU ecosystem for example. We’d be lost without them.
Maybe the biggest beneficiary will be AI/LLMs - which will become way better at creating Windows UX after this.
I don't know if that's quite what you meant, but I believe that this is the first time that I've heard of AIs being treated as a beneficiary and an "end" in themselves.
>This is unduly meanspirited.
No it's not? It's accurate.
>Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser.
A Windows UI project is not a "passion project" and the only """person""" that really benefits here is Microsoft.
>But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.
Contribute to something else that doesn't only help the bottom line of a mega global corp?
Why are you defending this?
It's sad how OSS enables predatory practices by the mega corps. It's definitely not just Microsoft, Google, Amazon at least also behave the same way, and the worst part is how the audience is captive - if they're stuck on any platform (since all the platform owners behave the same way), despite paying for it, the only way to fix broken parts of the platform is to fix it yourself.
For any time a legitimate bug gets a "we always accept pull requests" comment from a $XXXK paid engineer, I really wish I had control of an orbital laser, or a deathnote with eyes that work with text.
My favorite one was when the docs and helm template of Grafana was broken and I sent an email about it, I was told that they only have a single person working on the docs and that they were out of office, and that I would be free to do a PR
Then I learnt that this company is valued at >$6 Billion
I don't get it.
People do what they want to do, and might get enjoyment out of it. It can be as simple as that. That MS gets benefit from it, sure, and that's probably even their goal, but to say "I'm not going to do a thing that I enjoy, just because someone else might get benefit from it" is just a spiteful, mercenary way to go through life. If that's what keeps you going though, more power to you.
> No it's not? It's accurate.
Ah, that settles it then I guess. <eye roll>
I think you're missing a few steps there buddy.