Intellectual honesty

Yup, intellectual honesty, that's a problem.

It seems like when a crowd-sourced project needs more funds, one of the most popular things right now is to make vague promises to the linux community.

And it works, linux enthusiasts buy into stuff just for the promise of a linux port.

I find that offensive and intellectually dishonest.

Most of the time, the linux port is very badly maintained if it ever comes, and much performance in linux is voluntarily blocked because of "feature parity" with Windows.

Star Citizen is such an example. They have now announced a linux port, but they haven't done any work on it yet, so it's just an empty promise. Oh and by the way: the original Oculus Rift worked much better in linux than it ever did in Windows, but the next generation of Oculus Rift won't work with linux any more, so yeah, might as well mention that when you're announcing a linux port of Star Citizen...

Another example is Rust: works like shit in linux, so many bugs, much breakage... empty promise, not worth the money in linux.

Another example is CastAR, which is arguably the best AR/VR solution out there, because it's the only solution that touches the holodeck experience and the only solution that enables the social use of AR, and most importantly.... doesn't fucking track eyeball movement, so it's a user-centric product that just does what's advertised, instead of concealing a hidden commercial agenda like Google Glass or Facebook Occulus Rift. Just for the absence of eyeball movement tracking and other spyware functions, this is the only AR/VR product I would ever consider buying. But it's being developed for the Unity engine, which is cross-platform, but only works on Windows.

So I've come to the conclusion that it's not just a problem of the known "you can't trust it if it's 'Murican" thing (which IS a thing in both software and software-containing hardware!), but that it's most of all a problem of intellectual dishonesty, because if you can't trust crowd sourced "independent" projects to go for the evidently most economical and sensible solution, the whole project is a lie, just like the Oculus Rift turned out to be a crowd ripoff instead of a crowd sourced project. If a crowd sourcing project doesn't use the most efficient and all-encompassing solution, i.e. linux first, it's just not an honest project, and any "linux compatibility" they announce, is just a lie to get money from enthusiasts based on empty promises, and what's really happening is that they're burning the crowd sourced money on locked down incompatible platform development. It's just being dishonest about what the money is going to be used for, and that's the very essence of crowd sourcing projects.

That being said, the CryEngine is now on the SteamDB, which means that the next gen CryTek games (and other games, because of the very favourable 10 EUR/month licensing scheme CryTek introduced) will come out natively on linux. US companies should really take that as an example, and cut the bullshit anti-linux crap. They should stop treating customers like idiots and milk cows, especially in crowd sourced projects.

For me, if it isn't developed on linux natively, I'm not interested any more, and I won't spend money on it. Because I can't make any money of it, only Microsoft, Google and Facebook can, and I find those commercial malware companies unethical, especially because of the fact that they suck up all the profits and exploit developers. If it's a linux native project, I can develop applications and market solutions, which supports both the project and my own business. If CastAR for instance, which offer great opportunities for industrial marketing, would have been a linux native project, I would have invested heavily in application development, and many other companies would have done the same, and we would have had functional products on the market already, leveraging FOSS like FlightGear (used in many professional flight simulators) for instance. The development path is much shorter when you can leverage FOSS, more companies can profit from it, the project grows in significance much faster. When it's a commercial malware native project, all that happens is a lot of people who have invested money and/or interest, who can do nothing but wait for a solution that never comes...

I think allot of the dishonesty in crowed-sourcing you are describing is going to provoke users to shy away from projects that don't make precise & legally binding statements. It's a learning process...

Also the Linux community does not forgive nor does it forget. So ripp-offs are going to turn into "shot-in-the-footsies" because free and open operating systems are going to replace what little full-proprietary operating systems are left.

The desktop is going to become a niche market for enthusiasts and workstations, which is not going to be big enough for MS to justify the cost for developing windows. Also there is a much higher percentage of Linux-users among enthusiasts & workstation users, which also have a much lower tolerance for Microsoft’s unethical antics.

Which leaves us with Mobil: which is absolutely dominated by Linux (albeit somewhat polluted semi open source). Once the "all the new and shiny flair" has evaporated, consumers stop regarding it as a luxury item, & the tech gets homogenized for cost-efficiency, we're going to see more classic Linux distros with high ethical standards flooding in. Also intel and amd need to get their low power x86 offering on par with arm.

We're entering a transition phase where operating systems transition from products to infrastructure. it's going to be the ugliest and most painful decade of computer-history yet:

  1. MS isn't going to leave the consumer space as gracefully as IBM
  2. spy agencies & governments are going try to infuse their agendas into technology. "de-crap-ing" operating systems is going to become more time-consuming. China & Inda will eventually catch up with the US in terms of pulling cyber-war BS.
  3. The "Snowden effect" will provoke spy agencies to neutralize each other by infiltrating each other with remote controlled sudo whistle-blowers. Security emergency patches are going to become the norm, common criminals will win big time, milking security slackers. Sysadmins are going to be blamed for their inability to work magic 24/7, even more than the today.
  4. Linux community will go through the pains of growth (More bickering & dead-end solo-action development)
  5. Spyware-free computing is going to stay the privilege of people that know what they are doing.
  6. Nerds will retreat into dark-webs & mesh-wifi and it'll be like the 80's & 90's-internet again, too complicated for the ignorant Masses to fuck it up. (at first)

The good news is that proprietary & ad/spyware-supported software will be squashed by "piracy"  and adblockers, into an inconsequentially tiny niches.

That'll make space for honest & reliable crowed-funded open-source software development, that aims to build/keep a good reputation & hence repeat business-opportunities. Those entities will eventually become big enough(*) as well as distributed enough to resist governments/spy-agencies. 30 years from now they will be able to push large scale open source hardware.

(*) by supplementing their revenue with support-contracts.