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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

I guess it must be weird to you that people volunteer free labor and money for anything. People give free money to charity. Lawyers give free time to various causes. People give free stuff to Goodwill, a for profit company, and to Salvation Army (NPO). The volunteer to clean parks even though they're already paying taxes that are suppose to cover that. They give gifts to neighbors. There's nothing wrong with giving.

My open source is my way of volunteering to make the world a better place. Whether some for profit company uses it is irrelevant to me. Plenty of companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) give back way more than they take and even though I have about 100-160 original repos on github my free output pales in comparison to the amount of stuff I take for free. Nintendo might give less today but lead by example and that might change. Though if it never changes it still doesn't bother me in the least.

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> People give free money to charity.

Oh no.

> Plenty of companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) give back way more than they take

OH NO.

In what planet is donating to a charity the same as "donating" code to a for-profit enterprise, but even more insane (in my opinion ofc) in what planet do google and facebook "give more than they take"??

I don't know how to estimate how much Google uses other's OSS, but they certainly have generated quite a lot. Chromium, Android, TensorFlow, Go, WebM, Kubernetes, and Angular are no small contributions.

To play devil's advocate; Google give me access to an easily searchable index of the greatest repository of knowledge in all of human history for the price of a few ads. This is profitable for Google, certainly, but I feel I get more out of the deal than they do.

Google's revenue from ads for 2019 was some $135 billion.

Do you really think the ability to use their search engine is worth more than that to you?

With less than 0.1% of their annual ad revenue I could retire tomorrow, debt-free, and set up a trust fund for my daughter so she'd never have to work a day in her life.

But that is the total revenue for all ads. You hardly made up anywhere near 0.1% of that. I do believe that if you actually calculated the value that you contributed to that sum, you would agree that the value you got back was greater. I can't imagine I'd be even 50% as productive at my job if I didnt have access to the tools google provides for free.

Also I'm pretty sure the cost of ads to you depends on your person. The harder it is to get you to make irrational choices based on emotions evoked by ads the less it costs you to use ad driven services. If you are stoic enough to stop using Google services then I am certain Google ads barely affects you.

People say that ads work so of course you are affected by them, but I am pretty sure lots of people aren't affected that much by ads. Luckily for ad companies there are a lot of ad-whales out there, people who are very easy to influence and get money from. These are the same kind of people spending lots of money in free to play games, at casinos or who falls for MLM schemes.

Parent claimed that they got more out of search than google did. Parent did not claim that they got more out of search than google did, divided by the number of google users/ad targets.

Yes, I definitely meant that I personally extract more value from my searches than Google's entire ad revenue.

Google's entire ad revenue, of course, comes from "a few ads".

>"In what planet is donating to a charity the same as "donating" code to a for-profit enterprise, but even more insane (in my opinion ofc) in what planet do google and facebook "give more than they take"??"

Consumer surplus?

One example of Google giving back is the Summer of Code program. TBH I'm quite surprised that the other big tech companies don't also have GSoC-like programs.

Goodwill is a 501c3 nonprofit.

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