News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust by varispeed on Monday May 03, 2021 @09:05AM (#27024530)
> A little appreciated fact: Rust was largely built by students, and many of them interned at Mozilla.

So now companies make billions off of the software written in Rust and has even one student become a millionaire? Companies that appropriate such projects should start paying their fair share to people who made it possible for them to make such profits.

Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust by Ericson2314 on Monday May 03, 2021 @12:37PM (#27027206)
Yes workers are exploited, but it's also harder to create value when you insist on capturing it.

This is arguable a big idea of free software: trying to jealously hoard the value for ideas that are naturally freely copied and shared is just plain inefficient.

So yes, in this case it would be nice if these interns got a big pay out, but if they did, then the megacorps wouldn't bother using Rust because they plan is already to just outbid all the non-monopolists for workers rather than actually be productive with their workforce. And C++ and whatever else are already free, so Rust has to complete with those.

The only way to make things more fair is just give up on meritocratic value capture, and just do a big tax and big UBI, so just as free software is free to use by all, some of the value created in the use of free software is also freely shared by all.

Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust by rover0 on Monday May 03, 2021 @10:03AM (#27025196)
Being in the team that created rust would look great on any CV. I think millionaire is reachable for many of them.
Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust by varispeed on Monday May 03, 2021 @11:14AM (#27026128)
Under the current framework, you cannot get wealthy off of salary. If you working a wage, then you are a corporate slave most of the time.
Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust by seabrookmx on Monday May 03, 2021 @12:18PM (#27026969)
I don't know what your definition of corporate slave is, but you can certainly become wealthy off a salary.

Just limiting to software engineering (there's other lucrative fields out there) you can easily make a six-figure income remotely. This gives you the freedom to live somewhere with very low cost of living. It's not hard to build wealth this way.

You could debate that getting the necessary skills to get a job like this is harder than it should be.. that corporations themselves are broken.. whatever your worldview is that's fine but "cannot get wealthy off salary" is just plain false.

Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust by varispeed on Monday May 03, 2021 @03:21PM (#27029526)
> This gives you the freedom to live somewhere with very low cost of living. It's not hard to build wealth this way.

This is quite contradictory and proves my point.

Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust by staticassertion on Monday May 03, 2021 @04:57PM (#27030534)
> Under the current framework, you cannot get wealthy off of salary.

You can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as an engineer, without even talking about stock. I'd call that wealthy. If you're an engineer of some stature, 7 figures TC yearly is not out of reach.

Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust by rover0 on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @09:36PM (#27045104)
Agree, millionare is not wealthy.
Re:Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust by cies on Monday May 03, 2021 @11:07AM (#27026040)
Are you familiar with (a) open source licenses, and (b) the profit maximization principle?