For most people, [open source] is a hobby. It might be a hobby that people would love to be paid for, but then golfers or skiers would probably say the same too
Just keep comparing projects which form of basis of billion dollar codebases to people doing bougie sports. That’ll make your point for sure
What would happen if all these programmers just quit their hobbies? :thonk:
A lot of tech companies that are only profitable because of this free labor would go out of business, but the main monopoly companies would still exist, they would just have to spend more money on development and less on stock buybacks
(disclaimer: there's no way I'm watching this whole video)
Free 👏 software 👏 developers 👏 owe 👏 you 👏 nothing.
When you base your commercial enterprise on the labor of thousands of anonymous (to you) development teams that you never bothered to learn the names of or understand their motivations and concerns, you are committing malpractice. When you contact these people and treat them like Comcast customer support representatives because a decision they made or limitation they imposed due to lack of resources makes it more difficult for you to use their work in the pursuit of monopolizing the Internet, you are being a flaming bag of dog shit.
As an end user, I often take the labor of these developers for granted, but I can only imagine the kind of bullshit that emanates from the actual tech industry. The level of entitlement they have. The expectation that all of these grease monkeys will assume the responsibility of keeping the machinery of late capitalist society running smoothly without any form of striking or subversion. That some lowly contributor to Nginx or OpenSSL should lose sleep over the fact that Amazon AWS isn't extracting rents from their volunteer labor as efficiently as it possibly could.
I generally think the Suckless people are dweebs, but the concern over software "bloat," (or more neutrally, interminable dependencies) is legitimate. When you're designing infrastructure, you should have an intimate understanding of the components which are required to make it run. How the fuck are you supposed to maintain something when you don't even know what it is composed of? You don't design a bridge by making a pretty superstructure and taking it for granted that a sufficient support structure will materialize by magic underneath it. Imagine building a bridge and not even knowing or caring who your concrete supplier is or whether you've even cut them a cheque. It is basically applying the Donald Trump methodology of real estate development to software. This a la carte import 2000 dependencies and not give a shit who made them style of rapid application development couldn't possibly have any other outcome than biting people in the ass because an individual guy who wrote a library nobody's heard of which makes logs with pretty colors decided to pull the plug. And then it's their fault everything broke, and not to their credit that everything was working in the first place and the vampires who relied on it couldn't properly manage their expectations or cough up a measly few bucks and hire somebody to fork the project.
Everybody just assumes that there is somebody else out there not only doing due diligence, but doing it for free. Not only doing it for free, but doing it for free with enthusiasm. But when pressed, nobody can even name who these people are until after everything falls apart. They can only name the people who poked a hole in their fantasy that technological infrastructure grows out of the ground like weeds.
a lot of the big open source projects these days are either run directly by some megacorp or are heavily funded by them. There are on the other hand thousands or millions of smaller projects that are utilities or incidental dependencies that dont get anything though.
