What open source projects specifically?
> So, a large portion of open source contributions do nothing other than provide free highly skilled labour to Coca Cola, Walmart, and McDonald's.
In my opinion, any open source development is valued WAY MORE than closed source development, as it can be shared and verified by others. If you have a project that's benefiting multi billion dollar companies, then you've created something useful that can be shared with small companies and individuals too.
Also at the end of the day it's the developers choice, they can stop maintaining it, but the point is; sharing code is better for everybody
I have not contributed to any of these projects but for instance: Spark, Flink, Druid, Akka, Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, Java Spring, Hibernate, etc etc.
The world of open source benefits the powerful entities, and that's OK that's what open source is about... Everyone gets the code for free... No matter who you are
The risk is that it devalues labor. And could build a culture where so much is expected for free that there is never enough financial support.
Much like the improvements in farming and agriculture have changed from manually reaping the fields to AI controlled harvesting equipment.
There will always be software engineering problems to solve, they just move up the stack...
When fewer and fewer people are needed to do the same work it doesn't necessarily make for a better or more sustainable market: socially or ecologically. Consider a world where one needs 40 years of education (instead of say 20) to begin to contribute in a way the capital owners are willing to pay for. And paying for the privilege of much of that education.
But to me that's a pessimistic way to look at it. It's an accomplishment to need less people to build amazing things.
We're already at a point where even the most experienced engineer can only understand a fraction of the stack they use. Compare that with the 1970's where a programmer might understand 90% of the mainframe they use... because it was simpler...
Basically you don't need to know as much knowledge as earlier generations to accomplish the same thing, but this devalues that thing (or makes it much harder to be good at) ... All the low hanging fruit is gone I guess
And this is bullshit. Most popular open source projects see heavy usage in academia, personal projects, public projects, government projects, etc. Python is a massive reason any students know how to program at all.
At other points in our history that language would be BASIC or Pascal. Their initial implementations may not have been open source