Open source takes continued investment, and that must be subsidized somehow

Re:Open source takes continued investment, and that must be ... by molteanu on Thursday August 23, 2018 @02:18AM (#17825014)

I was thinking about this in the past, but seeing the comments here, by DoreenMichele and jondubois, for example, both of whom seem to agree that being an open source author is not a wise life decision right now, only reinforces my hypothesis that maybe this OSS has a lot of marketing behind it. I don't mean a certain project, but the very idea of it. Because, in the end, it just means the people basically have a second job, only it pays nothing. It means extra work is being done, tools are being created and the people who know how to monetize it, do, while the poor souls how keep soldiering on with the 80+ hour work week get only the "fame".

So isn't it possible that powerful corporations pushed and continue to push this OSS ideal, the ideal that you do meaningful work, that you'll bask in glory at the end of it, that your name will be carried on by armies of software developers until the end of time? Isn't it possible for all of this, or at least partially, to be just marketing coming out from the hands of people who really know how to tickle our emotions?

How much would git or linux or emacs cost to develop? Instead, they are developed/maintained partly by armies of "passionate" developers who get zilch for they work. But they are used by money-loving corporations for free. Now isn't that convenient.

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Re:Open source takes continued investment, and that must be ... by adim_web on Thursday August 23, 2018 @04:08AM (#17825458)

It's not really that simple. Writing free software is not zero sum (you either make money or you don't). The process of writing software is also a process where you learn things (which can be rewarding in itself, and learning from other free software is easier) that you can later apply even in your daily job. It's important not to treat free software like a money making machine. Providing value is more important than extracting money. For example Google uses a lot of open source software created by third parties and they make money, but they also provide a lot of services for free. As long as it remains a fair deal, it's not that important that a corporation extracts value from software created by others (as the money may go to people who maintain, test and provide patches). Remember that if you create some piece of free software that a corporation can use, so can somebody who doesn't have the money to buy a license, and that person may be a future developer who's going to write software for you.

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