[saltcured]

I wouldn't call it second class. Maybe second-order?

To me, it is no different than management, planning, logistics, marketing, etc. which is done for the purpose of supporting some other objective.

It simply means that you perform software development as work-for-hire in support of that other objective, rather than for the purpose of licensing revenue. It provides wages for services rendered, just like the vast majority of other job types.

It just doesn't provide for scalable virtual rent extraction for a "publisher" or other middleman. To me, that is a benefit of it. It removes a bunch of perverse incentives from the table. Incentives that tend to harm the developers and users for the benefit of those middlemen.

[rglullis]

In principle, I don't disagree. The problem is that in practice the large corporations managed to neutralize any chance for independent by commoditizing the software service layers that supported their business and invest all their resources they could to package their proprietary solutions on top of it, AWS and "OpenElastic" being the textbook example for it.

The one way to get out of this mess would be to have the market paying a premium for companies that do R&D in FOSS directly. It can not be a secondary goal, and we can not be telling them they shuold find some other way to make a living.