[koancone]

I am not sure what the point of these news stories is. Arbitrage opportunities have existed throughout history. How is it newsworthy? However, a basic understanding of economics would indicate that such market inefficiencies tend to disappear once widely publicized. I guess the journalist wants to grab a piece of the ephemeral surplus by publishing. In the same vein I don't understand why people share truly original ideas on show HN or waste their time contributing to open source. I guess everyone is wired differently. If I had been practising the sort of arbitrage the guy in the article was doing I would have been highly motivated to keep it secret, to minimize the number of new entrants (competitors), etc.

[eropple]

> waste their time contributing to open source

"Waste time." I shouldn't reply to this kind of antisociality, but this is gross enough that I feel compelled to. I contribute to open source because it is the right thing to do, because I have gotten so much from it that it is only right to pay it forward. You should be doing the same, not sneering at people with a sense of community to them.

[golf1052]

You're very right, the internet and technology would be very different if open source didn't exist.

Basically saying, if you aren't only helping yourself and turning a profit you're doing it wrong is a little disturbing to hear.

[koancone]

The internet and modern computers are the result of Government and University funding (e.g. DARPA, UC Berkeley BSD) and corporate R & D projects like Xerox Alto / Start at PARC and Bell Labs Unix, C, etc.

Free Open source volunteers merely imitated (Linux vs. Unix) or extended institutional or corporate sponsored projects or ideas. Without robust government and corporate funding of basic research in the later 20th century we would not have the well developed information technology industry we have today. People founding vanity projects, ICOs, and forking is not moving the industry forward. What truly revolutionary innovations have originated from open source software vs. just imitation or variation?

Blockchain is revolutionary but the developers did monetize their work in that case (literally). In this society you need to earn money to live. It is mysterious that so many people in software want to practice their trade for free. I guess they love what they do but I think the quality of their work would increase if it was monetized. Monetization need not imply centralization or appropriation c.f. bitcoin.

It just means assigning value and ownership to the results of socially valuable work. What is so evil about that? I think, from an evolutionary psych view why people think contributing to OSS is prosocial is because of something like a genetic tendency to share new technology with the tribe. In the ancestral environment it would have been uncool for one shaman to have monopolized a new flint knapping technique. But with the rise of trade and property right people can develop and protect their competitive advantage / economic niche and monetize their work for benefit of the whole of society why collecting a reward from their innovations. Free Open Source fanatics like the GNU people are stuck in the stone age and do the profession of software development a disservice.

[onion2k]

It just means assigning value and ownership to the results of socially valuable work. What is so evil about that?

Nothing at all. That's how Canonical built a billion dollar corporation building on and releasing, for free, open source code. That's why Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc all release huge amounts of their code openly and for free. There's no reason to believe you can't make amazing open code and generate huge profits too.

Free Open Source fanatics like the GNU people are stuck in the stone age and do the profession of software development a disservice.

GNU gave us the GPL and LGPL, which, combined with the rise of the internet for distribution, was fundamental in changing the way applications are built using other people's code. Those "fanatics" made every developer's lives immeasurably better. Even if you don't like the code they produce themselves you still have a lot to be grateful for.

[koancone]

It is also possible that Satoshi Nakamoto was an alias for an NSA project. I have no special knowledge either way on this matter.

[farah7]

>If I had been practising the sort of arbitrage the guy in the article was doing I would have been highly motivated to keep it secret

By your own token I think the sharing of such information would be "newsworthy". Your comment is rather inconsistent.

[koancone]

I don't know what you mean. My comments are not newsworthy. I am not practising arbitrage. I am commenting on HN because that gives me some recreational utility. What is inconsistent?