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by charcircuit 848 days ago
Financialization is why nice things can be done at scale. Without finanialization the nice things would be smaller and less common. Expecting people to do high quality work for free is not sustainable.
2 comments

Profit motives don't create quality. Passion and pride create quality. Unfortunately, passion and pride are unreliable, and products and services that rely on them are inconsistent. Profit motives create consistency, but produce products and services that are adequate at best.

So then, reserve profit motives for things that need to be done, and for which you can tolerate mere adequacy. I want my garbageman to be motivated by profit, because society would collapse in a week without garbage collection. For things that need to be done well, there's no alternative other than finding someone who actually gives a shit regardless of the profit involved (which isn't to say that they must live in poverty, but rather that profit must be a secondary motivation rather than a primary one; find someone who wants to be doing the work even if they weren't getting paid).

Passion =/= Competence

On the margin, there may be many people working in, for example, finance who would make highly valuable contributions to open source projects if they were financially incentivized.

What is effectively being argued here is that we should oppose grass roots subsidy of important public work just because there was a specific incentive issue in a specific initiative. The code doesn't care why you wrote it. Maybe some bad code gets subsidized. That's ok - don't use it.

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