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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Funny how the author found out how to make big bucks from OSS but then just decided to quit that

> Between 2013 and 2019, I was at Google developing the "LLVM lld linker". lld linker as open source software is kinda successful, and if you have a very large development scale, you definitely need to use it as a standard tool.

> [...] I could've got several hundred thousand dollars from the engineer job I retired (I was a Google Staff Engineer)

Software in general, open source or not, is not good business. If salaried job is not for you then consulting/freelance is pretty much the way to go for software engineers. Either way, you are selling your expertise and time instead of the end result.

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It is a strange twist that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are some of the best places to work on aspects of software that many people don't care about enough to pay for. A 1% improvement in the memory wasted by malloc is a cool thing that no small company or consumer would pay for. At Google or another hyperscaler, it saves literally millions of dollars per year.

Who would you say is capturing the value created by this software, and how can we fix it so that value goes to the people who wrote the software?

Not sure I have an answer but that shareholders and executives get the vast majority of the gains points to an extremely broken system.

End users are capturing the value. But of course that's the point of open source; you're voluntarily avoiding the proprietary software strategies that let you capture more value from your users. I don't think it has much to do with shareholders or executives.

> how can we fix it so that value goes to the people who wrote the software?

Not giving away the software for free would be a good start. There are many ways to charge people for software.

Software doesn't create value by itself, people using software creates value. With open source software anyone is free to use software to create value for themselves.

Of course Pikettys r>g still applies insomuch it applies to anything, but that is not really related to software anymore.

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