What is the greatest problem that FOSS has solved? - sebelk
======
leshokunin
The entirety of web backends is built on open technology by default now.
That's a pretty damn important achievement! Can you imagine if a company like
Google or Microsoft was in charge or making our webservers or databases? It's
really helped lower prices, increase accessibility and get people to
contribute without being part of their organizations.

------
RNeff
You can legally modify the program. You have access to the source code and
documentation, so if you have experience or hire someone or ask a contributor,
you can fix a bug or an annoying feature. An experienced programmer can modify
or optimize or strip out the bloat of a program. The reason all of the clouds
run on some variation of Linus is more the customization potential than the
zero cost.

There are free, modifiable versions of all the expensive Adobe software, all
of the expensive Office software, etc.

------
0815test
1\. Software piracy

2\. Keeping software projects as a going concern well beyond the lifetime of
any single architecture or platform. We routinely run FLOSS code from the
1980s (~30 to 40 years ago!) on modern platforms, which would be altogether
impossible if that code was proprietary!

3\. An emerging problem: spyware software that "phones home" for user-hostile
purposes.

------
termimol
It has commoditized some very expensive software at a low-low price of $0.
This has reduced the cost of experimentation and unleashed a giant wave of
creativity.

~~~
kleer001
the biggest one of these I know is "Blender", a 3D vfx modeling, animation,
shading, and rendering package.

~~~
jolmg
I once read that c compilers were also very expensive before gcc. There's also
Gimp to avoid Photoshop. Openoffice/Libreoffice to avoid MS Office. Linux
distros to avoid Windows.

