[Aurornis]

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?

[gchamonlive]

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.

[code_for_monkey]

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.)

[fuzzfactor]

>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.

[syncmaster913n]

Capitalism =/= free markets.