[ModernMech]

It's feast or famine out there. Pretty crazy to see this after reading OpenAI is giving each employee a $1.5M bonus. 99% of that money will go into real estate and the stock market, leaving open source like Perl / Raku scraping by with $11k from SUSE, who call it "a fundamental component". Building a fundamental technology gets you scraps, but riding on the hype train that's causing more problems than it solves gets you flush with cash.

And then people wonder why programming languages only come from big corporations these days.

[scottLobster]

If there's a couple of hard lessons I had to learn as an adult, it's that justice and morality are something you quite literally have to pay a premium for, and public opinion doesn't matter nearly as much as most of us were raised to think.

Amoral optimization for money is the only way past upper middle class outside of sheer luck.

[markus_zhang]

There is not much people can do to force big companies to donate $$ to open source communities.

I really don’t think OSS is a valid business venue. It could work, but most of the time it doesn’t. So either do it for the love and happiness, or just don’t do it for free.

[ModernMech]

Certainly there is! Raise taxes on big tech profits and use those revenues to fund open source. We shouldn't depend on love and happiness to build the technologies that are foundational to our largest companies, while they get rich.

[_mlbt]

These companies are not doing anything amoral here. If the developers of these open source projects expect to be paid for their work by any means other than voluntary donations they should use different licenses.

[ModernMech]

I'm saying this is a dumb way to fund critical tech infrastructure. And since the tech industry has proven they can't self regulate themselves into a sensible funding model, then we should use our representative democracy and create legislation that sees it done.

[markus_zhang]

But this is not realistic. Big companies pocket more politicians than all HN commenters ever know.

[dismalaf]

OSS isn't a business model. The most successful projects I've seen is when someone has a business, releases a tool they use, then others iterate on said tool that the business uses. Then everyone gets a better tool.

Think Linux, Rails, most programming languages, etc...

OSS as a business model usually means a rug-pull, and I've never seen it going that well...

[pjmlp]

Most programming languages have a commercial history related to them, either developed by corporations, or authors have been employed by major universities or corporations.

Linux was largely irrelevant until 1998, what happened then specifically?

> Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is first published as an essay (later as a book), resulting in Netscape publicly releasing the source code to its Netscape

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux

Rails happened because Basecamp made it possible.

[dismalaf]

All those examples prove my point.

[Perz1val]

Ideally big tech money enables people to retire early and they'd maintain open source projects in their spare time

[SoftTalker]

Maybe. When I retired my plan is to de-tech my life as much as I possibly can.

[pjmlp]

Not only these days, all major programming languages did in fact come from either big corporations, or their authors worked either at big corporations, or big universities.

As an example, people routinely forget that C and C++ came from AT&T, and they only get UNIX freebies, because initially AT&T was forbidden to profit from UNIX, the moment they were allowed to, Lion's book became underground culture, and the BSD lawsuit took place.

[FirmwareBurner]

IIRC, a dev of a famous python package, was begging for food on Twitter a few weeks ago.

It doesn't matter how smart you are or how useful to society you are, if you're not working for big monopolistic companies, you're not making real money.