I hope that isn’t true. For the sake of starving children, political dissidents, victims of war, the environment, people struck by disease, and many more, I really hope that isn’t true.
This massive leverage is sort of unique to open source because it’s non-rivalrous. Resources you donate like food, shelter, etc can only help a limited number of people.
Note that this analysis of highest-impact does not make any moral judgements about which is more important. I personally would rather pay to help build plumbing in Uganda rather than this, but it definitely won’t have the same leverage.
Love that trickle-down economics,
Step 1: less time spent on dev tasks
Step 2: ??????
Step 3: end war, end hunger
An improvement to the Linux kernel scheduler that could reduce the power consumption of every android phone and the majority of servers in the world by 0.01% has a bigger impact than building an entire offshore wind farm.
Let that sink in. It’s hard to fathom how leveraged changes are to the software run all over the world. This is not delusions of grandeur, this is just the reality of so much of the world running on the same software.