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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   24247 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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Well all cars have steering wheels but nobody ever tries to go out and claim that the steering wheel was their invention.

Cut me some slack, I was responding to a point that all these AI clones are somehow plagiarism.

Almost every time I’ve tried to pivot to FOSS, I almost always end up coming back.

Ok great, but how is that relevant to anything I'm saying? My argument wasn't "FOSS is great!" it's "FOSS is hard to make", and that it's absolutely insane that someone was able to BTFO it in less then a month, to the point that these clones may actually be comparable to their commercial counterparts. I'm less confident on the second part, since I'm frustration-tolerant enough daily drive FOSS, and don't know how it is to use actual Photoshop, but I can already tell you I have no reason to every look at Gimp ever again.

No I know what your argument was, which is why I only singled out a part of it to comment on. My point here is that FOSS isn’t at all hard to make if you have no regard whatsoever for producing crap. Which is often why closed, paid software or ecosystems succeed, because there’s institutional money behind it. GIMP for instance in no way is comparable to someone that makes truly complete use of Adobe Photoshop (that doesn’t mean I have to agree entirely with the latter’s business practices). That’s why I said as far as the simplest and most basic uses go (what, 10% of its use cases?), FOSS and AI assisted or developed open source projects may turn out decent. Beyond that, there’s still a question as to whether it’s at all comparable to their proprietary counterparts.

My point here is that FOSS isn’t at all hard to make if you have no regard whatsoever for producing crap. Which is often why closed, paid software or ecosystems succeed, because there’s institutional money behind it.

Then I think you forgot to make the "not hard" part of the argument. Just because it's crap compared to commercial software, doesn't mean it's easy to make.

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