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Comment by sneilan1 | Hacker News Reader

What about all the people who contributed over the years to Stack Overflow? All the people that took time out of their day for years to answer people's questions and keep the site organized. Stack Overflow would be worthless without its contributors.

It seems like Stack Overflow is a company that has figured out a way to profit of the Hacker Ethos of helping people. I guess if you concentrate enough naive volunteers in one space, you can sell their time to someone else.

This is happening a lot lately in Open Source and Tech. Just two examples: Wikimedia's endowment is reaching over 100 million dollars. AWS is making a huge amount of revenue of Redis.

Is there a point when the hacker ethos needs to become more broad? At the very least, we should be considering where we spend our time and for who.

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It's not an either/or.

People contribute to the site because they get value from it and want to give back. And for some people it's a kind of reputation. That's enough on its own, or else the content wouldn't even exist in the first place.

Totally orthogonal is Stack Overflow as a business. People need to write and maintain the code, run the servers, moderate the community, determine new features, and so on. They're the ones being rewarded by the sale, and they deserve it because SO is a whole lot more than just the user-generated content.

I don't think there's any moral or even social or "decency" expectation that people who have written questions and answers over the years would share in the business rewards. That was never an expectation going in.

Now, if Stack Overflow's founders want to find ways to "give back" to the community from their personal proceeds, then that's wonderful too. But they have no obligation to.

I think it's similar to all the super-liberal OS licenses that permit any usage of OS SW without warranting any kind of compensation for the original devs. Licenses that the devs themselves are putting in their OS SW. Why they do so I honestly don't know.

Which leads to a number of weird situations like maintainers begging for compensation from simple users while behemoths make tons of money out of their SW or pretty basic SW being undermaintained (I vaguely remember a case pertaining to a security related library a few years ago where everyone was waiting on an overwhelmed and unpaid maintainer to provide a security fix).

Dunno. Some things just don't make sense to me. FWIW as far as my projects go I license under GPL. If it's free for you let it be free for all. I'd hate to be in the shoes of Redis contributors. To me, if your work is being used you must be compensated. Anything else is just plain wrong.

> Wikimedia's endowment is reaching over 100 million dollars

When can they buy Mozilla?

That's the kind of consolidation I'd like to see.

If tech can't stomach unions, it'll never take to co-ops.

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