[robomartin]

> Counterexample: all open source software

Reality example: Open source only exists because people earn a living doing something else. It’s cost is very far from zero. In fact, if we accounted for it I would bet FOSS is, as a category, the most expensive software on the planet.

Nothing is free. A sad yet necessary truth that must be understood.

[necovek]

But that is the point. With basic needs covered, people work on stuff that they care about personally regardless of how much or how little it earns them.

Do also note that most people spending countless hours on standards work on them either on their own time, or more usually, their affiliated organisation time (university, company...). Standard bodies rarely pay for actual standard development.

[robomartin]

> With basic needs covered, people work on stuff that they care about personally regardless of how much or how little it earns them.

They also do nothing. Or go on vacations. There's a very small group of people (on a percentage basis) who develop enough drive and passion to work on FOSS at the level of domain expertise and dedication necessary to get anywhere.

It is important to make a distinction between developers who devote a non-trivial amount of time to FOSS and those who might scratch an itch once or twice in a codebase, never to be heard from again. While all contributions are valuable, GitHub is full of stagnating projects where occasional contributions from random developers simply isn't enough to keep them going.

Look at real active projects and you'll discover that the number of dedicated developers devoting the kind of time and effort necessary to sustain and drive the project forward can often be counted with one or two hands. That is evidence enough of what I am saying.

Why?

Well, there are millions of qualified software developers around the world who cover every domain in software development. I think we can agree that most of them have their basic needs covered. And yet, you don't see millions of developers flocking to work on FOSS.

Why is that?

Because the scenario you paint, for the most part, does not align with reality at scale.

The number of people who, as you say, "work on stuff that they care about personally regardless of how much or how little it earns them" is very, very small, a rounding error. You can't get very far on a FOSS project --particularly if measured across years-- without a very small core group that does all al heavy lifting.

BTW, the fact that FOSS can thrive with just a handful of developers driving a project and little random contributions from others here and there is fantastic. The ecosystem work very well and there's plenty of evidence to show this to be true.

My only point is that we should not pretend that millions of people will flock to FOSS if their basic needs are met. This sounds like one of those universal basic income arguments. And it simply isn't true. People don't function that way. If their basic needs are met, the last thing most people would do is sit in front of a computer for ten hours a day to write code for free.

[necovek]

Developing FOSS is not the only thing people care about: this discussion, in particular, is about working on standards.

You seem to be debating some other claim (about how FOSS can be maintained well) than people wanting to do things they care about when they are "settled". What I meant there is that they don't have to do their day jobs, which most of those millions you mention have to.

I have my own thoughts on FOSS (most of it is "finished" in that it served a purpose and there is no need for maintenance, even if it's imperfect and buggy), but we are not at a state where there are large groups of people who have the means not to care about regular income at all to know what they'd do.

FWIW, in the worst of times, it was the aristrocacy that pushed science and arts forward, because they were the only ones who had the means to do it: it wasn't as fast paced as today, bit it didn't stop either. We've since "democraticised" science and arts (gamifying it a bit) by also making jobs out of it and increasing access to education.

Sure, we don't need everyone to care about everything, but there will always be a critical mass of people caring about critical stuff.

[immibis]

Yeah. Because in capitalism you need to have a way to make money if you want to continue existing. Therefore all the developers who exist have ways of making money. It's not rocket science.

In not-capitalism, there's a possibility this might not be true. Open source developers MIGHT NOT need to earn a living doing something else.

[uraniumjelly]

Let's say everybody gets a UBI or whatever the heck. A standards organization would still need someone to give it that money to function/exist. This would be true in any economic system.

>there's a possibility this might not be true

Zero, zilch, nada. People will not do grunt work for free because it's not fun.

[robomartin]

> In not-capitalism, there's a possibility this might not be true. Open source developers MIGHT NOT need to earn a living doing something else.

That's all well and fine. Except this is a fantasy. It has not existed ever in human history, does not exist today and the laws of physics say it cannot exist in the future.

If we limit the discussion to reality, well, FOSS isn't even close to free. Before a person can devote effort to working on FOSS, they have to sustain themselves.

Look, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with this reality. FOSS has gone incredibly far and deep under this model. There's nothing wrong with recognizing that FOSS exists due to what one might call charity. It's people working at whatever they do who then donate some of their free time to whatever they care about in the FOSS domain. And that's fantastic. Let's not pretend it's free though. It costs every single contributor a non trivial amount of time to participate in the effort. And that isn't free for anyone on this planet.

What I am saying is that this isn't a bad thing, yet it is a reality that should not be swept under the rug.

[account42]

> It has not existed ever in human history, does not exist today and the laws of physics say it cannot exist in the future.

FALSE, FALSE and FALSE.