I totally agree. In my case, it’s definitely a case of “I bitch because I care” — and I am very appreciative of the app and the hard work that has gone into it. I cannot imagine doing all of that myself and making the app free at that.
I do think it’s a shame the codebase is such that seems to prevent meaningful contributions/collaboration that might improve things — but Kovid has done something amazing, make no mistake.
And more to the point — we all complain about Calibre, yet no other app exists that even does a fraction of what it does.
It's sad that the response to that is often "Stop bitching or stop using it", "Make it yourself", or "If you don't like it why don't you go somewhere else?" (and it's often from other users who try to speak on behalf on the developers.)
> I cannot imagine doing all of that myself and making the app free at that.
The only reason we are here talking about it is because its free software. Its not even about price, its about how Calibre evolved thanks to a community that grew around it. Maybe someone could start a proprietary ebook library program, charge for it, and make a living that way. But it would get orders of magnitude less usage and have done that much less good for the whole of mankind as a result. And the work of one person, or even a small team, is unlikely to accomplish all the features Calibre has because few people will recognize the collective needs of all book readers the way an open bug tracker and merge requests can.
I guess there is something to be said about applications purely focused on user needs and not engineering. MS Excel and MS Access applications vs applications developed by engineers using the latest framework. On a personal level I was happy Drupal end user because whilst I am a developer I am not a web developer. Drupal 7 was useful to me it allowed me to create useful web applications similar to using MS Access on the desktop. I cannot even get the well engineered Drupal 8 running because I honestly don't have the time to first learn things like Composer.
I do think it’s a shame the codebase is such that seems to prevent meaningful contributions/collaboration that might improve things — but Kovid has done something amazing, make no mistake.
And more to the point — we all complain about Calibre, yet no other app exists that even does a fraction of what it does.