[abstract7]

Consuming software cost producers zero, practically. You do have overhead from 'how does this work with docker', of course. However, don't get offended at the 'useless software eaters'. The greatest consumer beneficiaries are driving their populations out of poverty, like China and India. China is the #1 software 'cost externalizer'. Developing nations are the #1 relative gainers (proportionally) from consuming open-source. All this means lower infant mortality, less unemployed women, and longer life expectancies. Let them eat. The US, the largest and wealthiest, is the #1 open-source contributor. However, in absolute terms, we (USA) are the greatest beneficiaries of open-source software. Just look at how high of a valuation our tech companies still fetch and how we have most of the top corporations. Yet still, the millions of Indian persons getting online every year and other gains has a greater relative impact than a 3% growth in our real GDP.

Also the addition of new programmers from developing nations is going to drive development costs down. And with the intro of ML code recommenders and distributed platforms, dev costs will fall in half every few years in that not so distant future. Software is incredibly expensive to develop at the moment. See tech hubs real estate and housing costs. The global trends that affected middle America is going to enter Silicon Valley like a tornado.

Yet you make a could point that from an accounting standpoint, costs are not clearly accrued by the companies that contribute their workers time to their open-source dependencies. There is some inefficiencies in determining which contributor pull requests get accepted; corporate sponsorshing projects and hiring contributors is a payment, in some cases, to have a higher probability of getting code merged. The largest contributors of the most valuable projects, like the Linux kernal, are large stakeholders that are dependent on the project. And most successful projects I've seen have competition from developers seeking to add stuff that helps their company projects better interoperate with the dependency. So the accounting is not very accurate.

However, all open-source developer contributions will soon be weighed by others so that those not so high up on the project food chain can be directly compensated. This is getting worked on, now. Every one who contributes value will be rewarded.