Is the only possible social value of creative work the generation of a business? Maybe some things are simply better as a universal social infrastructure-- the benefit is that it exists for other things to be built around it, rather than as a direct business.
> Most of these detractors want to create one-off art pieces for the fun of it. That doesn’t bring food to the table or build a long term foundation upon which more advanced works be built.
To me, the big benefit is to move creativity from "the artist with his unsullied vision" versus "iterative multiplayer development." It's a principle I'd love to see not just in software, but all creative endeavours.
Yes, no individual hobbyist is likely to be able to spit up a project with the scale and scope of Windows XP, but a thousand hobbyists, each working their own fixation and interests, can potentially take an existing product and add real value to it-- or, eventually ship-of-Thesus the whole thing into something fresh.
Maybe you've got someone fixated on the device driver so he can keep using his one specific printer, or a student who wants to do his Ph. D. thesis on scheduler technology Another person just wants to replace every use of the world "whitelist" in the code.. Some of this stuff will be self-indulgent "art projects" but others are motivated by real productive aims.
You can't stop them, but now you also get the opportunity to cherrypick it. A new value centre emerges in curation-- like the role a Linux distributor plays. People will support a strongly opinionated project like Debian or Clear Linux because they trust the choices they make in curating and packaging other people's work, even if you could manually assemble the same elements from scratch yourself. The curators can then bring on professional developers to ensure that their interests are represented in future development.