Not sure what more you need; it is no secret that kernel code is written primarily by and for the benefit of corporate entities, and naturally they have priorities.
[I am not saying this as a bad thing; in fact, the GPL licenses are designed around this "fact of life" aiming to maximize the benefit for (all) the users and minimize control of a single powerful entity. I'd say the current state of affairs is amazing, considering the historical alternatives.]
It seems like a reasonable complaint, but a subset of
"Your bug is neither a regression nor a severe issue."
Since the paid developers, just like literally everyone else who contributes, do fix the most serious bugs in their areas of expertise/responsibility, but triage some reports as not the most valuable use of their time, or, if applicable, their company's resources.
Large companies hire people to work on open source. Some use their clout to influence standards.
As a developer I like that companies hire for open source. As a user the quality increases with full time employees. What we don't notice is many projects morph to fit corporate needs because they become important stakeholders.
Not OP, and I'm not sure specifically about which dark patterns you're referring to, but I can take a stab:
It's because Dropbox doesn't have a good business model (anymore).
Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. are happy enough to give storage away for free, or almost, and their solutions come pre-installed. For the average user, it'd be an uphill battle to get people to install Dropbox even if it were comparable price-wise to OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive - and it's not, because Dropbox actually needs to make money off cloud storage and these companies don't. It'd need to be leagues better than those other products (think Firefox overtaking IE, for a time) - and it's not. I think its sync is quite good, but I don't know if it's so much better than the alternatives that it'd persuade significant numbers to switch. And, as others in this thread have pointed out, its desktop client kind of sucks.
Moreover, "files" themselves are becoming an antiquated concept. They're definitely not dead yet, but they're almost a power user thing at this point. Documents are stored on the cloud, embedded inside the specific web app (Google Docs, Notion, Figma...) you used to create it. It sucks, but that's the direction we're heading. File sync is becoming less-and-less essential, to fewer-and-fewer users.
Dropbox is a public company: they can't just shrug their shoulders, tend to their core user base, and iterate on their product. That's not going to produce the kind of growth they need to keep investors happy; you need a good business model to produce that kind of growth organically. Hence you need to produce it inorganically: dark patterns.
arguably we wouldn't have JWST without Hubble, so cost adjusted they're about the same, then again, there is probably some "prior art expensive project" associated with Manhattan, but I didn't check :)
As for the Manhattan Project, it was sufficiently close to the first direct theoretical and applied theory and proofs of sustainable nuclear chain reactions (roughly a decade or less following each), and a lack of understanding of the corresponding risks (which greatly increase costs) that there simply wasn't time to have spent all that much money.
By contrast, Hubble and JWST are both late-stage, highly-evolved technologies, pushing the engineering envelope in many dimensions simultaneously, all of which tends to increase costs.
See for example the ELT (extremely large telescope), an Earth-based instrument currently under construction in Chile as part of ESO (European Southern Observatory). Tom Scott's 'splainer video on the project explains how costs risk exponentially with increased size for numerous reasons.
reply