This also underscores my explanation for the “worse is better” phenomenon: worse is free.

Stuff that is better designed and implemented usually costs money and comes with more restrictive licenses. It’s written by serious professionals later in their careers working full time on the project, and these are people who need to earn a living. Their employers also have to win them in a competitive market for talent. So the result is not and cannot be free (as in beer).

But free stuff spreads faster. It’s low friction. People adopt it because of license concerns, cost, avoiding lock in, etc., and so it wins long term.

Yes I’m kinda dissing the whole free Unix thing here. Unix is actually a minimal lowest common denominator OS with a lot of serious warts that we barely even see anymore because it’s so ubiquitous. We’ve stopped even imagining anything else. There were whole directions in systems research that were abandoned, though aspects live on usually in languages and runtimes like Java, Go, WASM, and the CLR.

Also note that the inverse is not true. I’m not saying that paid is always better. What I’m saying is they worse is free, better was usually paid, but some crap was also paid. But very little better stuff was free.

There is also the option by well written professional wherer the startergy is to grab as much market share as they can by allowing the proliferation of their product to lockup market/mindshare and rleaget the $ enforcement for later - successfully used by MSWindows for the longest time and Photoshop .

Conversly i remenber Maya or Autodesk used to have a bounty program for whoever would turn in people using unlicensed/cracked versions of their product.Meanwhile Blender (from a commercial past) kept their free nature and have connsistently grown in popularity and quality without any such overtures.

Of course nowadays with Saas everything get segmented into wierd verticals and revenue upsells are across the board with the first hit usually also being free.

The only reason FOSS sometime works was because the replication cost is almost $0.

In *nix, most users had a rational self-interest to improve the platform. "All software is terrible, but some of it is useful." =3