| HN Mirror

> You could argue that much open source work is like volunteering to serve food at the local country club.

It's more like volunteering to pave the road in your neighborhood because you want to help your neighbors out, and also to make it easier for your friends to come visit you at your house.

But eventually, some local small businesses realize that they can use the road to get their commercial goods to the market faster. At first, you don't mind because they're not causing much harm. Why not let them use the road?

But eventually some international megacorps hear about the road and start to tell their trucks to use it too. After a while, some of the truck drivers start to loudly complain about the way the road was designed. "This road doesn't let us drive our trucks as fast as we want to. Please fix!"

Next time you're repaving the road, you spend some extra time to make it less curvy and easier for the truck drivers to drive fast, even though you don't own a truck and this doesn't really help your friends or neighbors.

Eventually, even more huge companies start using the road to bring their goods to market. Their complaints get more frequent. "This road isn't designed for our eighteen-wheeler trucks that we'd like to drive through here! Please fix it or we'll start using another road!" And on and on...

Eventually, you realize that you're working for free and this isn't about helping your friends and neighbors anymore. You start to tell friends in other neighborhoods who are considering building their own free public roads not do it (it's just not worth it). You recommend if they want to do it that they at least charge a toll to use the road. That way the road won't be overused by folks who complain and don't give anything back.

After word gets around and some time passes, the world has fewer public roads and the remaining roads require a toll to use.