What if every software became FOSS? Who would put in the free labor to write the software

The implication that we can make all software FOSS and have nothing else about the world change is a textbook example of putting the cart before the horse. It's like asking "what if everyone became vegan, who would pay the cattle ranchers?"

The world FOSS strives for, the world where it is the norm, has a fundamentally different economy from our own.

It's not a valid thought experiment to ask "what if all software was FOSS (but nothing else changed)?" because that creates a hypothetical world that has a fallacy at its core. A world where entire social movements can blink in and out of power without regards for sociological and historical factors is a world unconstrained by logic as we understand it. The correct framing should be: "what would our world have to change to enable FOSS to be the norm?"

The distinction is subtle, but cuts to the core of the contention betweem movements aiming to change the world in radical ways and their detractors offering criticism that boils down to "but the future you propose doesn't integrate seamlessly into the present state of affairs."

We all want change, we just don't want it to change things.

That's an interesting take on FOSS - that's it's a free buggier alternative to "mainstream" software?

Linux is ubiquitous across many devices (you won't even know you're using it) and servers yet it's all based on FOSS. There isn't an alternative for many of those usage cases.

Browsers like Firefox are FOSS. The alternative is not less buggy, but it is less private and sells you to advertisers. But even propriety software like Chrome is based off an open FOSS codebase from Chromium.

Other software has no better alternatives. Look at VLC (for video), OBS (for streaming and video capture), Calibre (for eBook library management). There are arguably all the best in their class and they all FOSS, and that is just scratching the surface.

Tools like WINE are FOSS only but they are revolutionising gaming having been repurposed into the Steam decknfor example.

Eveb the software that might be characterised as "alternatives" to thebincumbant proprietary software servers a major purpose. GIMP (alternative to Photoshop) and Libre Office (alternative to MS office) are free but also now increasingly important do not require any online subscriptions and data sharing with big corporation. For many people that's hugely important - why pay money and subscriptions for things you can get for free at high quality?

FOSS is a huge ecosystem of software, all of it free to use, change and share.

It seems like most FOSS I've seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software,

That's probably confirmational bias. Plenty of FOSS projects out there that are pretty stable. If this weren't the case then we wouldn't have critical systems running Linux, FreeBSD etc. For instance, take your router, it's not only probably running Linux, but also uses several dozens of FOSS tools that are a core part of the ecosystem - if FOSS is really as buggy as you think, then critical systems like routers and basically 90% if the internet would be crashing all the time.

or create something more complex like a machine learning advanced AI software?

Ironic you should say that, because some of the best machine learning/AI tools right now are FOSS (eg Stable Diffusion, Llama 2, Claude, GPT4all etc).

What about people who have bills to pay? Would their bills be covered?

They're either paid by donations (via Patreon, Github Sponsors etc), or they get hired by companies which depend on their work (eg: see how Valve hired developers to work on various FOSS projects that the Steam Deck depends on; or the best example is the Linux kernel itself)

Richard Stallman listed four freedoms essential to software users: freedom to run a program for any purpose, freedom to study the mechanics of the program and modify it, freedom to redistribute copies, and freedom to improve and change modified versions for public use. To implement these freedoms, users needed full access to the source code. To ensure code remained free and provide it to the public, Stallman created the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allowed software and the future generations of code derived from it to remain free for public use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

In my words: It gives back control to the consumer. Instead of the big corporations effectly being in control of your computer, smartphone, the internet platforms, what videos you get to see. And which updates from your friend's will result in a notification and which of your friends to drop. And they'll happily sell your personal data, track you, show massive amounts of advertisements to you and program their software so you get manimpuated into staying longer than you would have wanted on their platform and manipulate you into buying and doing what they like. The Free Software movement is trying to give control back to you, so you can't be exploited.

There are ways to combine free software with making money. For example by selling additional services, consulting and maintenance. There are more and it's a complicated topic.

And there are other challenges. For example our way of using technology today, mainly 'the cloud' makes things even more complicated.

The goal is to collectively free humans from the enslavement and dangers that proprietary computing represents.

It's a collective fight for freedom. Then of course we must continuously question and revise the tactics, and invent new ways of funding, sustaining, supporting, etc... the goal.

The goal of FOSS has been evolving since.

Let's start from Richard Stallman, the first promoter of Free Software (that's the original naming of FOSS, free means not at no-cost but as of freedom to share and modify the software).

In 1970s, there has been little-to-no protection of sharing the software (examples of then-important software was: code compilers (C, FORTRAN), interpreters (LISP, also FORTRAN), mathematical tools, hardware drivers, shell utilities and the operating system itself). The main consumers of software were the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), DARPA (a military experiments lab, creator of the ARPANET that then evolved into the modern internet), university researchers (like MIT Artificial Intelligence lab) and the computer manufacturers (like IBM). There used to be no difference between computer users and programmers, in contrast to the present time. Instead, all of them were hackers (until it became a buzzword by mass media to denote bad actors). They were the people who were striving to push the limits of computation. The software was viewed as common good everyone can reuse, modify and share. It all was so until the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act when software became copyrightable and lots of software manufacturers began developing proprietary software. Stallman was one of the first Free Software fighters. He founded the GNU Project and the legal basis for the copyleft software (that forbids embedding it to the proprietary software). It also coincided with absurd pricing of the influential UNIX operating system, that skyrocketed to thousands of dollars per unit. So the GNU Project managed to write its own C compiler and many shell utilities.

Stallman, and most of the first wave of Free Software supporters, wanted to ensure that computers are used for freedom and that proprietary software was banned. Although he pointed out there must be a method programmers have to be paid, he couldn't provide a scheme about how programmers could be rewarded, leaving the development of Free Software to very few fanatic developers that see the development of Free Software as lifelong satisfaction.

The second wave started in the late 90s, after Linus Torvalds had already created his own kernel, Linux, that allowed computers to run the complete operating system without dependence on any other proprietary software. The newer generation started acknowledging the fact that 1) private companies are not necessarily evil; 2) free software developers should focus on inclusion, rather than rejection of anyone who don't conform to their standards (private companies, again). This lead towards a schism among developers, and a new wave of Open Source software began to appear. Open Source software aims to broaden the userbase of people using FOSS, attract new developers, improve code quality of FOSS, etc., instead of de-proprietarizing the whole world.

TL;DR: There are two directions of FOSS:

1. Free Software strives we don't live in a proprietary dystopia;
2. Open Source software aims to maximize the userbase of FOSS.

Now, about your concerns about software quality are legit. But there is a paradox. The more devs and users are working with the software, the better quality it is. But users don't want to work with the software that is of poor quality => less users => less feedback from the users (bugs, feature requests and the general idea on how the software is used and should it should be used) => lower quality. And there are factors on devs, depending on who makes the software. Volunteer devs, in general, are more pleasant with making new stuff instead of maintaining the old software. Even worse, they don't want to maintain software that is poorly maintained and/or unpopular (doesn't have a catching perspective). This is how FOSS programs die.

Further watching: Revolution OS (2001 documentary about FOSS)

At least for the moment I'm doing it because it is fun. The main project I'm involved with is a fork of something that was pushed to the side and killed off by the big corporation developing it. Are there other tools that do the same job? Yes. But the fact that a small community came together to save the application they liked and is having fun working on it is the only justification I need.

Look at Blender and MediaWiki (the software running Wikipedia). They’re both FOSS and are developed and maintained by volunteers, backed by the end users. They’ve become such a big part of people’s lives, both professionally and privately, that they’ve become the mainstream choice.

There's no single goal to FOSS. I write software for my own needs, and it literally costs me nothing to give it to other people. It makes no difference if I give it to one person, or one million, or one billion - it's no harder, or easier, than giving it to no one. Other people seek recognition or the approval of other people. There are probably as many goals as their are FOSS authors.

Financially, you either try to support yourself by soliciting donations, but that just makes it work, and - for me - imparts a sense of obligation to my users. But, yeah, most people have other jobs.

Lemmy development is partially funded by the NLnet Foundation:

financially supporting organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It funds those with ideas to fix the internet.

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2020-06-23_-_NLnet_funding,_and_Lemmy_v0.7.0_with_new_image_hosting!

Good question, I was thinking about this the other day. The reason being that development of several fediverse apps has seemingly stalled because the previously active developers have life issues. (I’m not moaning about it, just a straightforward account)

It seems to me that FOSS developers wouldn’t want their projects to be popular. Because that comes with pressure to constantly improve or expand and it takes up more time. So they start a Patreon or similar but that adds more pressure.

When projects are community developed then I see disagreements and personality clashes which increases stress for lead developers.

In addition to advancing freedom, it's also genuinely advancing the technology of the human race. Both philosophically (as any other tech is simply what they PERMIT you to do), and practically... as even the worst technofacist vendor-lockin saas'ers build their empire on the backs of open source stacks.