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by marcus_holmes 2864 days ago
I agree. There's nothing intrinsic to Open Source that means "for the greater good". And Open Source is beneficial even when done by greedy corporate bastards. There's even an argument that by crowdsourcing pull requests for free, an Open Source company is actively being greedy and capitalist.

However, the kind of mindset that enjoys being a greedy capitalist bastard finds it very very hard to accept the Open Source philosophy - it's all fear-based, "do unto others before they do unto you" and so "if they can rip my code off, they will", because that's what they'd do. I've experienced way too many hard conversations about open-sourcing code with this type of person.

So there tends to be a correlation between Open Source software and a co-operative mindset that would find this type of coercive marketing bullshit to be evil and reject it. This correlation becomes an expectation.