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Comment by TurboHaskal | Hacker News Reader

I always liked this post by Erik Naggum:

    The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is
    not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or
    needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student
    grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a
    lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not such a bad idea.
    Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get
    seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people
    actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and
    concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be "nice" to some
    "community" which turns out not to be "nice" _enough_ in return that you will
    actually stay alive, is no longer an option.

(continues) https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3217750625724755@naggum...

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> The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not such a bad idea. Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be "nice" to some "community" which turns out not to be "nice" _enough_ in return that you will actually stay alive, is no longer an option.

> Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house

There's your problem. Don't shackle yourself to a system you already know doesn't care about you, then get upset when it's abusive.

- "Grown up" is a children's game (which somehow doesn't involve taking responsibility for them world), - you don't need college to learn or hone a skill, - you can love a person and not marry them, - you can't simultaneously dislike the world and justify bringing children into it, - and if you can't afford your house you can always sell it and live in a van.

Open Source Software is one of the few decent things people still do, even if the world they're doing it for is not.

This is incredibly insightful; particularly the final dig regarding an unwillingness to compensate others for their efforts.

It strikes me that the open source bounty model never really took off, and neither did the open source crowd funding model.

It's hard to convince users to contribute funding when many of them were drawn to your software _because_ it is free as in beer. Free2Play video games have struggled with this for years, and look at the state of monetization in that market: predatory gambling mechanics, digital storefronts tuned to maximize anxiety in purchasers, and so many hats.

Perhaps the future of open source funding is in selling personalization customizations, somehow.

This whole argument is built on the premise that when you fall ill for a while or have an accident, nobody will help you and you'll die instead (I guess they didn't mean it so literally, but that's what the text says). As far as I know, this is actually false in every part of the world that can afford it except for the USA. You may not earn a lot while ill, government support isn't everything, but roughly a thousand bucks a month plus medical expenses paid isn't peanuts.

I think you haven't read the other paragraphs. Please do so if you haven't.

But nevertheless, contrary to some open source developers, doctors are not giving their labour force for free nor living below the poverty line. The value of a doctor is very clear to our society and in Europe we happily pay our taxes to keep the universal healthcare system running. The value of software on the other hand is decreasing.

Let's turn your analogy around. Are you complaining that there aren't more hobbyists dabbling in medicine without licenses nor viable careers? Or that society doesn't actively pursue and arrest programmers for doing similarly...?

There are countless developers making successful careers out of it, just like medical doctors. In addition, there are many more successes on a spectrum that includes the programming equivalent of GPs, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, drug store clerks, pot farmers, herbalists, dietitians, mothers dispensing band-aids and kisses, and aged boy scouts who happen to be in just the right place at the right time to save someone's life with first-aid.

There are countless activities in life that may or may not have viable business plans behind them. What sets programming apart from doctors and other service-based industries is that our work product is trivially replicated and shared by others. Look to literature, music, theater, and cinema for metaphors about the roles and compensation of content producers in culture and society.

There is, in fact, an excellent charity called Doctors Without Borders who are all about doctors giving their labour force for much less than society would generally value it for. They're not the majority of doctors, just like the majority of software engineers are not charitably motivated open source developers. They are, however, doing immensely valuable work serving people who would otherwise not have a shot at getting any sort of proper treatment.

I'd never heard of Erik Naggum before but his wikipedia entry makes him sound interesting as hell-

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

Erik Naggum is such a legend and it's truly a tragedy that he is gone, and also that we really no longer have any technologists of his calibre.

I saw a conversation on twitter the other day about how great XML is and why we should use it more and realized that even if I posted Erik's classic take on this, it would only mean reactionary outbursts. I wonder how many people would even understand his arguments about SGML today?

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