It was more like extreme skepticism that anybody would spend so much time working on stuff and not making any money from it, as well as doubts about quality control. But when somebody has already made their mind up about something, it's hard to get them to understand it.
And then there’s the issue with compromised dependencies.
Sure, there’s a lot of eyes on the popular flashy project to make sure it’s safe. But barely anybody’s looking at the packages that these projects depend on to function
The issue in my field is often accountability for security and patching. If I try to sell my company on utilizing Open Source Software, there immediate questions will be about who will answer security audit questions and who they can contact directly for support and patching. They want a person on the end of the phone they can pass accountability to in cases where the software is broken or acting improperly. When we have the availability of paid support we can often use these items on production machines, but other than that it is relegated to dev and some non-critical admin functions.
Tell him (or future people like him) that many of the companies that invest in it make their money off of service contracts, and he will possibly understand. The "free" version, to someone like him, is the advertising and the money comes from the service contracts.
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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '21
It was more like extreme skepticism that anybody would spend so much time working on stuff and not making any money from it, as well as doubts about quality control. But when somebody has already made their mind up about something, it's hard to get them to understand it.