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> The proprietary mindset has infected the "programmers with free time" community ...

I don't know whether there is a difference between today and twenty something years ago. Anyway, as long as one has not enough money to live on passive income, time is money. So one has to somehow monetize on one's one time and skill. This is not poisonous. Earning money is just a matter of life, because one needs money to live from (or someone else has to pay the bills).

I had a quite popular open source project about two decades ago. A lot of people used it (there were more than 300 people on the projects mailing list alone), and many of them also for commercial purposes. There was an option to donate to the project; but when I remember it correctly, I recieved only a single donation in all the years. However, I considered my open source work as a kind of quid pro quo for all the free software I use. But when the project ended, I had no motivation to invest any more time in another open source project, because I considered my "debt" repaid and moved on to other kinds of social engagement.

Having been involved in at least some degree over that period, yes there is a large difference. Not a simple one; there are both good and bad differences. (I would guess that the raw amount of open source code produced today is rather larger, for example.)

> So one has to somehow monetize on one's one time and skill. This is not poisonous.

It is not poisonous in general. I get paid for programming, and don't have a problem with others getting paid for programming. But the "monetize all the things" mindset is indeed poisonous to the original heart of the open source community, where people are motivated by the desire to share and are making decisions that are consciously aligned with growing the strength and health of this open source community.

They can coexist, but there is tension and cannibalization between them[1]. It's more of an ecosystem. Two populations are living side by side with blurred edges between them. Some rate of defections from one to the other. An environment that encourages one and not the other can hugely alter the size and health of one of the populations, and that's what we've seen happen: many aspects of the environment have shifted to encourage the profit-driven crowd, to the point where the share and share alike crowd are looking anemic. It's not about one being good and the other bad, it's more like an invasive species lowering biodiversity and making all of us worse off.

Think of it as value creation vs value capture, if that works better for you. My claim is that the community has swung too far in the value capture direction. Most work these days that looks like the older model is actually being funded by massive value-capturing organizations; they're just capturing the value from somewhere else. I applaud such contributions, but don't pretend that they're passion projects of civic-minded individuals anymore.

I'm not going to look down on someone who works for money. It's not a bad thing to do, and there are good reasons why they might even want to do things differently but cannot. It's just that they're not part of the particular community I care about, and I am interested in the health of that community.

[1] Ok, monetization generally cannibalizes open source and not the other way around.

The criticism of open source software the author presented is a lot more nuanced, and I for one agree with it. Even long before loot boxes etc, the overwhelming majority of "original thinking that used to create interestingly novel experiences" in gaming did not originate from the OSS community.

It is a completely different story when it comes to non-gaming software though.

     Great article, but it did give me the "an elephant is like a rope" 
     feeling—it seems like it's one person's idiosyncratic perspective, 
     some of which I agree with and some I disagree with, and there 
     isn't really much justification for changing my mind about the 
     parts where we differ.

But this is exactly Jimmy's writing style and the entire (extremely long) series is like that - it's not meant to be a wikipedia page.

Sorry, I was being too indirect.

The whole intro section is weirdly selective about what to include and weave into a single narrative. I lived through that time. There were a lot of other things going on that paint a different picture. Not that the description is definitively wrong or anything, it's just that it is very like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. It's not wrong to say an elephant is like a rope, but it is incomplete to the point of being deceptive.

The odd rant about open source makes quite a tenuous leap to the meat of the article, which I enjoyed much more and didn't have any particular issues with. "An elephant is like a rope, now let's talk about the fascinating physiology and ecology of the hippopotamus, a roughly elephant-shaped animal."

Ok, that's unfair, the opening and the Rogue history are more related than that. But note that the latter is explicitly called out as an "exception that proves the rule" of the former. Yet "most A are B, so now let's look at a rare example of a not-B that is an A" only supports the opening thesis insofar as you explain or at least make the point that `A & not(B)` is uncommon and illustrate it with your example. Simply giving an example of where your argument doesn't hold, well... it just undercuts the argument.

Anyway, it's not the author's responsibility to write an article in a way that works for me. And I certainly don't want something complete or wikipedia-like. It's just... odd. It talks about how open source failed to live up to its expectations. That relies on an overly literal acceptance of those expectations, because in my mind it has vastly exceeded those expectations. People were indeed overenthusiastic, but even then not many were claiming it would take over everything.

Is a developer scratching their own itch a fundamentally flawed approach that will never produce software that takes its users' actual needs into account? I would argue that they are reasonably independent from each other. Someone scratching an itch may very well be able to maintain a coherent design, or something may start with itch-scratching but then attract the involvement of designer-architects, or the reverse: itch-scratchers may join in a more "designed" project once it starts to show promise and be useful enough to trigger its own itching. On a related note, the purist "cathedral vs bazaar" interpretation is largely a myth. The bazaar pretty much always evolves some level of organization, and cathedrals are staffed with people, people who are often motivated by itch-scratching no matter what the high priests ordain.

I am sympathetic to the argument that programmers tend to produce things to be consumed by other programmers. I am also sympathetic to the argument that once a program gets to the point where it is useful to other people, it has a strong tendency to get absorbed into an organization that makes it usable by a broader audience. Is that a failure of open source or a success? It depends where you draw the finish line.

Blender, Godot, Firefox, GNOME, WordPress, GnuCash... it's not like there aren't counterexamples out there.

And the plain fact that nearly everything is now built off of an open source base, and that base is steadily moving up the stack, makes me suspect the "open source can never handle X" argument has a limited shelf life.

I agree that the open source section was a bit strange and not really necessary for the article's actual focus - when I read it I immediately thought this will create a completely avoidable flame-war.

> Blender, Godot, Firefox, GNOME, WordPress, GnuCash

Two of your examples begin with GN, which, of course, is a reference to GNU (explicit in the case of GnuCash) and thus a reference to the Free Software movement. Which the author of the piece rather noticeably neglects to talk about at all.