[pavlov]

Holy shit. That's just insane.

It feels like some people treat open source developers like government employees. Both provide a seemingly "free" service, and when you're not paying it's easy to ask for more and get upset about trivial things. (Of course neither group deserves this kind of thing.)

[wnevets]

>It feels like some people treat open source developers like government employees

This is actually a very interesting comparison.

[endisukaj]

> Both provide a seemingly "free" service

I'd argue that open source maintainers provide a free service. Government employees do not.

[pavlov]

Many prominent open source projects are supported and often initiated by corporations. I imagine Google pays the core Angular team quite well.

[endisukaj]

Of course. But most of the time users are not paying the maintainers whereas with government employees you are paying them through your taxes.

[emn13]

Well, that's hardly any different to google. You have no control over the details of those taxes. If anything, the advantage you grant google is likely more direct and quite probably more costly if you're comparing apples to apples. It's just really hard to compare those.

Don't forget, google gains quite a lot from giving away software like this, and some of their gain (in the form of control) may well be a cost to others - and it's not a zero sum game, so it's anyones guess whether it's a net positive or negative (even though that seems unlikely).

Similarly, you talk of the paying taxes as if this were some net-negative cost. There too this isn't a zero sum game - just because you distribute the costs but don't account for the benefits doesn't mean it's not net beneficial to you. The government is even larger than google (and indeed intertwined the the semi-fiction of currency), so "paying them" doesn't really mean the costs are much more direct than they are with granting google influence of the JS ecosystem.

Even if through voting you could choose the cease to "pay" for the government employees, the consequences might well be far-reaching and impact the currency system (hence "pay" in quotes), so from one point of view you can't with any reliability choose not to pay, rather, you can choose not to account for costs accrued by a large civilization. But it's highly questionable whether you can actually avoid those costs and remain a large civilization.

[pavlov]

I don't know. If you use Google products and see ads, you're indirectly paying for the development of Angular.

Not everyone who uses government services directly pays for them either (they might not have income or it might be less than the required minimum for federal/national tax, for example).