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Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

> Open source has only “won” for programmers

This is completely false. Corporations and Venture Capitalists are the ones who capture most of the value from open source projects. Independent developers got screwed over big time. We are the biggest losers. To the point that we probably would have been better off without open source. I've met popular, very skilled open source developers who can't even make a living as developers.

The top 10 open source developers in the world only earn a high/normal salary (e.g. Evan You of VueJS earns about $200K from Patreon; probably less than what he got at Google as a regular employee). He probably also makes money from conferences and talks; it's not bad, but if you look at the top musicians in the world, the 200th most popular musician alive probably earns millions per year.

The 200th most popular open source developer alive is probably a homeless person.

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This is sort of like saying the only people who benefit from music are the music industry. A lot of the benefit of open source isn't easily measured in dollars, so it's difficult to say who benefits more, businesses or users.

Nearly everyone builds their software on top of open source libraries, so the beneficiaries or "free riders" if you prefer include both lots of other programmers and the end users who download their software.

But, that's the choice you make when you choose to work for free and give away your stuff. Isn't it a bit weird that we expect anything else? And yet occasionally it works, you can sometimes capture a small fraction of the value through Patreon or whatever.

If you want a less precarious income, there are jobs working on open source software. The 200th most popular open source developer probably works at Google.

>> But, that's the choice you make when you choose to work for free

Choice is a relative thing. A lot of developers go into open source as a last resort because they believe that it's the only way that they can get access to users. Corporations have a near monopoly over users.

Since we're on Hacker News, I'll point out that starting your own company is another approach, though it can also be a hard way to go.

Sometimes the real issue is that the market is very competitive and user expectations are high, which is the opposite of a monopoly, though it can still make it very tough to break in.

Given many programmers got their careers started by making plugins, themes and sites using open source CMS systems, I'd say those won pretty handily. If you've ever used WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki, Magento, phpBB etc for a project, you've benefited from open source.

Same goes with anyone who used open source programming/scripting languages. The likes of PHP and Python are open source, as are Ruby, JavaScript, C/C++ and even now Java.

Hell, it's probable web development wouldn't exist with anywhere near as much of popularity if most basic components of it weren't open source.

Does that mean some people can't make much like they used to? Sure. But it also means a lot more people can make a living at all.

And given the salaries of many developers/programmers, it's a lot better as a situation than the one journalism is in right now. Or the ones involving creative fields like art, music, media, game development, etc, where the top 0.01% make money and the rest kinda struggle.

The ability to dip into the sea of preexisting (permissive) open source software to deliver value justifies higher developer pay. More thoughts on that here:

https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/01/22/largesse-oblige.html

Microsoft in the 90's before they used open source was paying its developers quite well.

They say capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with. But programmers do not understand business, so instead of selling ropes they made their own hanging ropes and freely shared them with everyone for a nice communal hanging.

(capitalists ended up selling hanging platforms instead, the ropes come with the platform for free)

So true.

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