[clearcoat]

I don't think things are nearly as "broken" as these types of alarmist takes make it out to be. Quite the contrary I think FOSS is a model that other industries would do well to adopt.

People talk about companies "free riding" on FOSS, but the corollary to that is that this allows an individual developer to be massively more productive, justifying the high salaries we see. To obtain value from just about any open source project, companies need to hire developers, individual developers are in a position to benefit as the gatekeepers to all this "free" value.

Everyone is benefiting from this. Free is absolutely essential to making this work. Free is frictionless, free is equalizing. I'm not choosing between Redux over Mobx based on price, I'm choosing purely of intrinsic merits and community.

It is always easy enough to find problems, but looking over the past couple of decades, I don't think you can argue but that things keep getting better.

[goodpoint]

> free is equalizing

On the contrary, SaaS company are advantaged at exploiting FOSS and this is creating increasing inequality in access to software, hardware, knowledge/skill, markets and capital.

In short, FAANGs and SaaS take all.

There's a reason why progressive taxation and public funding has been invented: infrastructure that benefits everybody need to be paid according to income.