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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

If I make a pencil and give it to someone, and they use it to draw a picture that they sell for $10m, they haven't ripped me off. They've added a lot of value to that pencil. I haven't lost anything. They haven't "profited from my work". They've done something pretty amazing using a tool I created. Good for them.

FOSS is the same. The idea that people are taking FOSS code and building billion dollar companies with it are somehow doing nothing of value except deploying your code is complete nonsense. FAANG companies that use FOSS software as the backbone of their tech stack are not simply deploying some code. They're working hard and adding value on top of it.

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I think the analogy would work better as:

You make a pencil.

Someone takes your pencil, and puts it in a really nice box with some other pencils.

People use those pencils to draw a $10 million picture.

The box maker uses contracts to ensure they get a 10% cut of that picture sale.

Actual pencil makers gets no cut.

I can see why this would annoy pencil makers, no matter how nice the box is, or how much effort they put into sales. At a societal level it seems incentives are slightly out of wack too.

Personally, I'd rather see all the money go to the artist than add more levels of ownership, control and cuts, especially if the inputs are non-rivalrous.

The classic economics example is lighthouses, we all benefit from the non-shipwrecked ships bringing goods to market but feel like the merchants should probably contribute to their construction via taxes rather than rely on randomly charitable lighthouse builders (see: Public Goods)

> Someone takes your pencil, and puts it in a really nice box with some other pencils.

Not quite, because what you're paying for in AWS for instance is not just the nice box (and AWS glue like IAM), but abstracting away all the annoying hardware stuff you'd have to deal with yourself if you went box-free.

Particularly, it's a lot easier to scale hard up and down (and thus better align your infrastructure spending with the actual demand) in the cloud than it is with on-prem hardware. So cloud providers are billing for that convenience and flexibility because maintaining all that hardware and providing the glue between the services becomes their problem.

I'm not really AWS's biggest fan (I go full self-hosted on my personal projects and when I must use AWS for work I'm careful to avoid vendor lock-in), but neither do I think it's fair to characterize them as just putting pencils in a box.

I think a better analogy would be: I make a pencil and give it to someone for free, and that someone puts that pencil in a box and sells it for $10m.

Agreed, but I think the analogy should follow the pencil, not the person. This seems to shift focus towards that someone who made the $10m. What does the buyer who just spent $10m do with the pencil? Do they hoard it as a trophy, or does it become a tool that provides some value to society?

The pencil analogy reminded of this quote "

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe … if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolise, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because — well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this Earth knows how to make me.

REF: https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl.html?chapter_n...

Ha! Equating the relative value and effort that went into the underlying FOSS tech to "just a pencil", is a pretty accurate description of what a company does.

In reality, many a company would put a frame around the picture and market itself as an innovative artist. There's value in the frame, sure...however...

Equating the relative value and effort that went into the underlying FOSS tech to "just a pencil", is a pretty accurate description of what a company does.

Take Facebook as an example. The first version of Facebook was essentially built on 4 FOSS projects - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Facebook couldn't exist without them (or alternatives). But of themselves nothing about those projects represents the value that lies in creating Facebook.

Suggesting that the value in a product is within the programming language, database, server software, or OS that it's built on makes no sense. Certainly no more than suggesting a valuation picture owes something to the person who made the pencil it was drawn with. It absolutely doesn't.

FOSS applications are tools that we use to build things. They're essential, and critical, and immensely useful, and companies ought to fund the maintenance of them much more, but they are not where the value in the applications that people use them to build comes from.

Facebook's value of storing and serving images and posts of individuals is all in the tech that it is built with. Are you saying that there is nothing in the engine, body or wheels of a race car that represents its value? If your product's value requires certain technical properties (robustness, speed, conforming protocols) and you did not develop those then you did not create all the aspects that your users value.

A picture's ability to convey the art, absolutely does owe a lot to the technology (ink, canvas, culture) that was used in its creation.

When visiting a historical, oil baron's house the guide said the painting they had was a routine copy of a certain work and it was the ornate frame that truly demonstrated their wealth. Cultural signaling is a 'value' all its own.

go make a pencil this afternoon

indeed, it is easy to miss the shoulders we stand on

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