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Comment by DC1350 | Hacker News Reader

> The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end.

Why do people choose to work for free on open source projects that are mostly used by businesses? I can completely understand making things that are hard to monetize, user facing applications, or trying to learn something. But when I see free contributions to things like infrastructure management I just don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you just get a job doing this if there’s obviously a business demand for it? If I made something for free that was primarily used by people who made money off of my work it would completely kill my motivation and I would feel taken advantage of.

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In my opinion those people are in privileged position - they already have money, they don't have to worry what they are going to eat if they don't do work and so on, so they show off. It's kind of like a rich person driving around in his or hers Lambo. They do this work for free and then there is less work for people who cannot work for free. Why would company hire anyone if they get free contributions.

Is there really a lack of demand for software developers of the level that can contribute quality open source contributions?

people do not stay on projects forever and then they are literally stolen. Or companies adopt a project and then throw their weight around.

for the former case: do you think former gnome contributors (who started the project exactly because their feared the ossification of window managers trying to copy windows, see their https://web.archive.org/web/19990224084927/http://www.gnome.... manifesto) would be happy with designers that ignore users and copy everything from osx?

for the second case, just look up how much linus fought against tainted kernel and still ended up giving up because of corporate/funding pressure. Also how google employees do whatever they want to chromium, for example, removing every single contribution to restrict referrer because that is how they made money from clicks on google search ads.

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