This is a weird quirk of history. I feel like open source, and especially free software, was at least left-adjacent when I was coming up in the 90s. The bad guys were the megacorps. Open source was the counter-culture. I guess it changed around the dotcom boom.
Netscape feels like a big part of the story - a company staffed with hackers coming out of a public-funded research institute who rewrote a closed-source version of their browser that quickly killed off the predecessor and helped the company to a massive IPO. Then, only when threatened by a more established player, they finally open-sourced it. From the outside that came across more as a Hail Mary than an authentic expression of principles. Around then we also had the Red Hat IPO, the Slashdot/Andover/VA Linux thing etc. It was clear by then that open source had become another gimmick that capitalists could leverage to compound their wealth, rather than a fundamental belief that users of a piece of software should have the right to modify and reconstruct it as they see fit.
Nowadays capitalists love open source because their startups and big tech investments are the users - open source provides free labor whose products these companies can repackage and sell as a platform. Meanwhile a lot of that "free" labor is no longer done by hobbyists or researchers, but by workers at other for-profit companies looking to boost their personal brand or the company's profile, so the whole motivation to contribute has changed too.
In a free market system people can transact as they wish, including giving away something for free if they want.
There is nothing at odds at all. If you don’t see it, you might have a rather cartoonish, villainy view of a capitalism that gets promulgated by people who refuse to allow anything good or nice to be ascribed to capitalism.
If you can’t understand why capitalists can also like open source, have you considered that maybe it’s your understanding of the system that is flawed, not theirs?
I understand that capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit. This is invariably going to be at odds with the core tenets of open source, because given enough time ownership will have to give way to profit, hence the embrace, extend, extinguish and the various changes in licensing in major opensource projects.
However that's not even the case because op wasn't criticizing capitalism as whole, just how absurd the ethos in HN is where we seem to defend contradictory values.
one of the core tenets of capitalism is the profit motive, its a central piece of it: the idea that people innovate and create and labor for the expected reward of a pile of money, but so much of tech actually bucks this idea between open source projects and public funded initiatives (maybe not as relevant for app based coding, but the space race was pretty important for technology overall.)
>capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit.
These are not actually essential.
I'm not going to put down a better definition of capitalism, but if you're not handling Other Peoples' Money, and they're not handling yours, you are definitely not a capitalist.
No matter how financially successful you are as an entrepreneur with your own money, even when you out-compete capitalists in a pro-capitalist market.
Netscape feels like a big part of the story - a company staffed with hackers coming out of a public-funded research institute who rewrote a closed-source version of their browser that quickly killed off the predecessor and helped the company to a massive IPO. Then, only when threatened by a more established player, they finally open-sourced it. From the outside that came across more as a Hail Mary than an authentic expression of principles. Around then we also had the Red Hat IPO, the Slashdot/Andover/VA Linux thing etc. It was clear by then that open source had become another gimmick that capitalists could leverage to compound their wealth, rather than a fundamental belief that users of a piece of software should have the right to modify and reconstruct it as they see fit.
Nowadays capitalists love open source because their startups and big tech investments are the users - open source provides free labor whose products these companies can repackage and sell as a platform. Meanwhile a lot of that "free" labor is no longer done by hobbyists or researchers, but by workers at other for-profit companies looking to boost their personal brand or the company's profile, so the whole motivation to contribute has changed too.