[wrong_variable]

What solution do you propose then ?

Money is always decoupled from value ( Warren Buffet paraphrased ).

Sometimes people who add negative value like the oil men in the Permian basin get paid 100x then your pip developer.

Screw that, large amount of the surplus generated by technology companies ends up in the hand of land owners instead of stockholders ! let alone the engineers building it - who might be riding on the work of open source volunteers. Its turtle all the way down.

If you are a volunteer, you are forgoing payment and are subjecting yourself to exploitation by others by definition.

Unless you have a mechanism for enforcement you are shit out of luck.

[habnds]

Isn't this the point of "copyleft"? Create a valuable product, require that when someone builds on it, that what they create also be free to use.

Open source software fails like this even if it's valuable because fixes and improvements don't necessarily make it out into the open, whereas Free/libre software, if it's valuable, gets stronger over time because fixes and improvements must be available to everyone.

[WAHa_06x36]

Adding "fixes and improvements" to software haphazardly does not, in general, make it stronger. Quite often it can be the opposite.

Software projects need someone to maintain its course, make sure changes match the purpose of the software, and most importantly, reject changes that create a burden on the project.

[afarrell]

Not only that, but onboarding yourself into a new project/codebase can take a significant amount of effort.

[Seirdy]

The point of copyleft is more ideological; it prevents others from using your software to restrict user freedoms, thereby limiting the spread of harmful, nonfree software. Copyleft is primarily intended to protect users.

[codeisawesome]

Hold the phone. When you say “oil men” are you referring to the entrepreneurs or the workers? 100x s/w engineer salary sounds like a big deal..

[eesmith]

"pip developer" probably means relative to the specific funding for pip development - very little - and not a full-time software engineering position.