[aniviacat]

> People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind!

We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).

> being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.

edit: remved anecdote

The cost of living will never rise so much that the upper 50% can't easily make enough money. (Otherwise what? The other 150 million people go homeless?)

And unless our industry sees a major shift, which I don't see happening, software engineers will continue being comfortably in the upper 50%.

[carlosjobim]

> We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).

That's a given. If you open source your code, other developers will steal it and sell your software. Just like billion dollar tech companies are the main benefiters of open source today, that some guy made for free. Excuse me, I meant for $42 in donations.

[immibis]

That's why I make all my software AGPL now.

I haven't published any software at all recently. But if I did (anything non-trivial), it would be AGPL. Or even SSPL.

Permissive licensing (MIT, BSD, Unlicense, public domain, etc) is a scam to make you work for companies for free - if your software is worth anything to them, that is. They told developers they should use MIT licenses so more people would use their software. That's true. They didn't ask whether that was a good thing.

[samatman]

If you don't want to give away software, and it sounds like you don't, then. Don't.

Perhaps you're under the impression that I blindly click the button for a permissive license? No. I read it first. I know what it allows. That's why I choose it.

I think it's nice when companies make money, for the record. Pays for houses, puts food on the table, sends kids to summer camp and college. Some of them even make a lot of money. That's fine too.

If they want to use my software in the process, more power to them. That's why I put my name next to the copyright notice, on a license which says in plain English that they can do that.

[immibis]

Did you know that every dollar a company makes gets taken away from someone? It's zero-sum if you aren't close to Jerome Powell. Why assume the dollar is better in the hands of the company owner than whoever had it before?

[samatman]

Every dollar a company makes is given to them by someone, in exchange for something else.

I go to the supermarket, they don't take my money. I pull it out of my pocket and swipe it into their coffers. They have food, you see. Which I can eat. Unlike money.

Strange how a game you describe as zero sum has built the prosperity of the modern world. I wonder if something is missing from your understanding of how that game is actually played.

[aniviacat]

The economy is not a zero sum game. We (non-politicians/non-billionares) have significantly more resources than we had 100 years ago, and we will have significantly more resources in 100 years than we do now. And open source developers are a small part of why.

[immibis]

The economy is not a zero sum game because we produce more stuff. Money, however, is a zero sum game unless you are Jerome Powell. We produce more stuff because we work hard to produce it, not because venture capitalists have larger bank accounts.

Especially in relation to open-source software, this should be obvious. Software exists because someone wrote it, not because a company owner was paid for access to it. Programmers may be paid to write software. However when comparing two worlds, one in which a programmer wrote some software for free, and another in which a programmer was paid $1 by a venture capitalist who received $5 from a customer who is now out $5, it's not at all clear that the second world is better. Especially since in the second world, the customer has to keep paying and has to contend with software full of ads that make it slow.

[aniviacat]

When I write open source libraries I consider the ones benefitting to be the general public.

Even if my libraries were used only by mega corporations (which they aren't) there would still be a benefit to the public: If companies have lower cost, they will charge lower prices, benefitting customers / the general public. (And yes, they will lower prices. Most markets are not monopolies.)

[carlosjobim]

Open source never benefits the general public, because open source developers never make a product polished and user-friendly enough to be usable by the general public.

Instead, open source mainly benefits other developers. But at the end of the chain there has to be a product that is of use for non-developers. Because developing isn't for developments sake. And the person who makes that product reaps all the monetary benefits from the work that the others have made.

If FOSS people made complete products which were end user friendly, I'd buy the argument of benefitting the general public.

[aniviacat]

> developing isn't for developments sake.

[citation needed]

> the person who makes that product reaps all the monetary benefits from the work that the others have made

Which means that they can offer their product for a lower price, which then benefits the general public.

Companies being able to operate cheaper / more efficiently does benefit the general public, as long as the market isn't a monopoly. And as per my above comment, most markets are not monopolies.

> open source developers never make a product polished and user-friendly enough to be usable by the general public

I've been using Audacity, Gimp, Inkscape, uBlock Origin, and many others long before I knew what FOSS means. Spliit is also pretty cool ;)

[AlienRobot]

That's a very interesting perspective, thanks. :-)