[Wowfunhappy]

So let's say your side project improves your life by 5 happiness points. You have two options:

--- OPTION A - Keep your project private.

• You get five happiness points.

--- OPTION B - Make your project public.

• Other individuals may get a small number of happiness points.

• A megacorp might turn your project into a major product without compensating you and get a million happiness points.

• You get five happiness points.

----------

In either scenario, you still end up with five happiness points. If you release your code, other people may get even more happiness points than you, which isn't really fair. But you are no worse off, and you've increased humanity's total wealth of happiness points.

[lispisok]

You really dont see why somebody wouldnt like a megacorp to take their hard work, use it to make a billion dollars, dont see a cent themselves, while struggling to buy a house in this very unaffordable housing market?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/total-happiness-in-the-world-...

[mullingitover]

Google, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Red Hat, etc. are huge players in open source, they probably contribute significantly more hours of work in building and maintaining major open source projects than the hobbyists.

Not that hobbyists don't contribute, but these models are certainly being trained on the work of salaried engineers as much as their trained on hobbyists' spare time projects.

[tom_m]

Yea those companies do...but you know what? Those engineers working there contributing that code are getting paid to do so.

[dragonwriter]

This assumes that none of the effects of making a project public or private have any impact on the output of your personal utility function, which may be true for you personally, but certainly cannot validly be assumed to be generally true.