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Are open source devs forced to do open source work? No? Then they're not slaves.
I can't even imagine what context would allow that comparison to be okay
You definitely can compare anything with anything, but - no, open source development has 0 in common with slave labor.
Your edit approaches a reasonably interesting question but why on earth would you frame it in such a ridiculous way?
Labour is exploited the world over. And certain forms of labour are exploited more than others. I can't find it but a few years back a hedge fund billionaire explained that nurses care about people so they don't need to be paid well because their rewards lie elsewhere. But for psychopaths* like him, money is the only thing that matters so they need all the money.
*I may be paraphrasing a little
This is a part of the machinery of capitalism, as was (and is) slavery. But there's no simple binary divide between exploited/not exploited. There are very well paid people who are being exploited (like the Twitter engineers who are trapped by their work visas) but there is a difference of degree, if not kind, between their situation and, say, people on domestic work visas, people trapped in the various forms of modern slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade. It is not always wholly unreasonable to draw parallels between the mechanisms of these different forms of exploitation but, if you wish to do so, you need to be very, very clear that you are not equating them.
In this case, the question is a complete non-starter.
What would have been much more interesting is a discussion of the risks of handing over your work to those in a position to exploit it without a fair return. Doing it for free applies to Redditors and Tweeterers much more than it does to open source developers, who typically make a good living out of their work (or are building a portfolio in order to try to make a good living out of it).
They are in a similar position to the SAG-AFTRA strikers, who do get paid (badly, on the whole) for their work but are now in a position where the studios can steal their words, their images and their voices to produce infinite derivative content without paying those who created the source material.
I don't think it will happen to FOSS any time soon, if ever, because the high tech magic 8-ball can only regurgitate content that already exists, rearranged in superficially logical ways that it does not understand. It has the potential to be a labour-saving device, for sure. And that will mean higher output (and lower earnings per unit output) for human coders. But it will also mean that more ambitious projects become feasible (affordable) so the effect on total employment and total earnings is unpredictable. Unlike many of the SAG-AFTRA strikers, those high-level "make the magic 8-ball code functional" workers will still be needed. They'll just be churning out more code than before (assuming it is quicker to correct the bad auto-generated code than start from scratch), not dissimilar to the way journalism has changed in the age of the internet.
It's a concern. But it's going to be very difficult to have a sensible conversation about it on a thread that started out this badly.
uhhhh… no?
It’s somehow impressive that you read an idiot take somewhere and needed to run it past anyone for verification.
