zlacker

FOSS offerings are almost always worse than their commercial competitors because of one obvious thing: people (that includes software engineers) need to eat and have shelter, and for 99.9% of us that means working for a living. Companies pay people to work on products that other people buy, ideally at a profit for the company. FOSS creators are rarely compensated meaningfully compared to the effort put in. The natural consequence of this is that most good engineers are not going to put much, if any, time in developing FOSS applications. The natural consequence of that is that these offerings aren't going to be as good.

>>sidlls+(OP)
In order to build a good email client application, you need more than just software engineers. You need product managers, designers, usability experts, internationalization experts, accessibility experts, tech writers, manual testers, etc. For whatever reason people with those skills tend to be less willing to contribute free labor to FOSS applications than software engineers.

>>nradov+Ih
That's a great point, too. Software applications are more than the code in them. All those other folks are required to make an application good. I think the "whatever reason" for these people is the same as for the engineers, though: they gotta pay rent, and working for free doesn't do that.