In this case, it appears you’re talking about a billion dollar hotdog.

> In June 2018, Elastic filed for an initial public offering with an estimated valuation of between 1.5 and 3 billion dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch

> Schuurman is Elastic’s biggest shareholder with a 19 percent stake valued at $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Banon, the chief executive officer, owns 12 percent of the Mountain View, California-based company.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elastic-software-founder-doub...

Seems you're reading too much into what I said. I wasn't talking about a metaphorical hotdog, nor was I talking about the Elastic case. The post makes no mention of it either, people on HN just assume it was about it because of the timing (and maybe it was, but I am talking about the general issue of free software). Personally I don't care about companies like Elastic or Amazon, anyway, and I look at it from the point of view of a single programmer writing software.

> can't buy a hotdog with all that "wealth".

Perhaps not but you can do almost anything imaginable with information using that "wealth". Using our collective wealth, you could run all sorts of analysis on if or when you should eat that hotdog. Just because the wealth doesn't deliver you to a utopia doesn't mean it is worthless.

A hotdog is not utopia, it's a basic means of survival (food). When you can't get the basics, you may have trouble figuring out how to exploit that kind of "wealth".

The issue is that the pyramid is upside down. Everyone should receive a basic universal income that allows the freedom to give away value to society without starving.

Perhaps the hotdog is slightly cheaper than it otherwise would have been, because the hotdog manufacturing company used a bit of open source software to save on production costs. "Wealth" is more than just raw cash.

But yeah, the total wealth generated for the software's author personally is probably minuscule.

Furthermore, free software devalues software development. This is why much of the industry nowadays is about services or products where software plays a small part or is very specialized.

The author of this post praises free software, but makes his money from providing a service. That's great, and I like free software as a user (who doesn't), but the post misses a bunch of elephants in the room.

More likely the hotdog corp made more profit and chose not to pass it on to the consumer/employees.

That's only sustainable in a world with no competition. Otherwise hotdog corp's competitor can take advantage of that same open source software to reduce their prices and customers will buy those hot dogs instead.

If that where true everything would be sold at minimal profit margins. In reality, established competitors avoid price-competition in favour of competing on brand/product/location etc.

The competition argument fails to take into account significant business overheads that allow the largest of corps to compete only among themselves.

Yes, that was a simplified example. Maybe ACME Hotdogs uses the money they saved to drop their prices, but Hotdogs Inc. instead decides to use it to open stores in more locations, Big Food Corp. decides to use it to pay their executives large bonuses, and Weiner Dogs LLC decides to spend more on R&D to make a tastier hot dog.

In the end, consumers will decide which of those approaches results in the better value for them and reward that company with more of their business. And regardless of whether that choice results in a cheaper hotdog, a tastier one, or just a more convenient location to buy it from, they're better off (wealthier) for it.

If you local cinema only stocks one hotdog brand, consumers don't get a lot of choice. The target of any corp, and the market ideal, is a virtual monopoly - where consumers don't get choice, the market optimises for this at the upper levels.

"patent trolling" is a classic example of how the market is not always consumer friendly - the approach of suing your competitors is intended to prevent consumers ever having the choice of doing business with them.

> If you local cinema only stocks one hotdog brand, consumers don't get a lot of choice.

Sure they do; they can choose to visit a different cinema, or to stop visiting the cinema entirely. They probably won't, but that's not because they don't have a choice, but because "this cinema doesn't stock the type of hot dogs I want" is a rather trivial concern when it comes to choosing what cinema to visit.

> "patent trolling" is a classic example of how the market is not always consumer friendly

I think it's rather unfair to use government intervention (the patent system) as an example of a market failure.

In general, anytime there's a large centralized authority controlling what the market is allowed to do (whether that authority be a government or a corporate monopoly) there will be inefficiencies.