[nogoodnamesleft]

> The pros and cons need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.

Utilitarianism? Watch it quickly spiral into a shit show.

These same concerns and arguments are nothing new. People have been bemoaning the evils of open-source and it's socialist ways as unethical and selfish for years. And look how the software market still flourished. In many cases, directly off the backs of unpaid developers.

There's a good chance we're beyond a tipping point of ever again having enough work for the masses anyway. Look how many able-bodied folks the Feds hide under disability to keep the unemployment numbers low. And computing jobs will continue to vanish as software advances. You gonna tell a software company they can't launch their accounting AI because of CPA job losses? You going to stop IBM from improving Watson because it might cost us some Javascriptkiddie jobs (don't need as many web pages if Watson can do my work just by talking to it, or just having a brain-wave interface)?

Humanity will shrug and do what they did when cars replaced horse and buggy: Carry on.

[jtuente]

So I think most people completely miss this when they see it, but I love it when people call "socialist" things selfish. It's the very definition of irony that something done "for the benefit of others" is deemed to be done solely for the person's ego. Personally, I don't see open source as inherently socialist anyways, but that's another topic entirely.