[kstrauser]

No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.

If surgeons could wiggle their fingers and make a better scalpel, at no cost, and give a copy to all their friends, also at no cost, I bet they'd have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.

[bellowsgulch]

Your comment is hilarious, because of the people most suited to manufacture a better scalpel, it's people in healthcare because of their income being in the 1% of individual compensation distribution.

Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.

Where is this mythical no cost software you're talking about? Is it in the room with us right now?

Where does your income come from again? Is it this same zero cost software we're talking about right now? The same zero cost software that an employer pays you a salary and benefits for, or...?

[kstrauser]

> Your comment is hilarious, because of the people most suited to manufacture a better scalpel, it's people in healthcare because of their income being in the 1% of individual compensation distribution.

Yeah, but takes nation-state amounts of money to bring new medical devices to market.

> Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.

Buy a laptop, Linux, self, Linux, Linux, Linux. There, zero cost for an individual person to write software on the laptop they already owned for other reasons.

Put another way, my kid can sit down at their computer and write a web browser without paying a single additional penny.

I don't owe it to anyone to pay them money instead of writing an equivalent version myself. I choose to pay some vendors money because they've done nice work and I'd rather slip them cash than spend the time to re-invent their particular wheel. That's the category BBEdit's in for me and why I buy their apps. But I don't have to. And yes, I give away literally 100% of my off-work software for anyone else to use who wants to. I wrote those things with free tools for free languages to run on free operating systems, so why not give back? I have a day job to put food on the table. My hobby projects are entirely in the FOSS world that you seem to have forgotten exists.

[doublerabbit]

> No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.

Blacksmithing, metal working?

[idle_zealot]

Did I miss blacksmiths gaining the ability to infinitely duplicate and teleport their finished pieces into people's hands? Can one learn this power?

[exe34]

Teleport? You mean over fiber optics that cost millions to install and maintain?

[idle_zealot]

Hey, if it only cost millions to install and maintain a leyline network with magic circles capable of transmitting matter for pennies then I would count that as teleportation, yeah.

[kstrauser]

To a point, although you can't make your own kiln for free. The tools in those trades consume a significant amount of resources, where computing is basically free once you pay for the hardware. Something like GCC is the software equivalent of a steel mill. Even if you could design one and give out the designs for free, you'd still have to pay for the raw materials to construct one.