GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

At least for me, this is not true. I owe the world nothing, and I give away most of my code.

Motivations can more complex than debt relationships and greed.

Traditional open source licenses and definitions of open source demand that the licenses not differentiate between different use types (personal, commercial, governmental, etc.) Newer licenses are coming up that do differentiate. Traditional open source orgs are often saying that they're source available, not open source.

"Open source" has become synonymous with "free labour" for a lot of firms, and there's a whole class of SaaS projects which amount to gluing together other people's open source work and then supporting it.

I think this was all fine for people during boom time; you built your resume up on GitHub, you got street cred, often your employer paid for you to work on it. But I think it's starting to lose its sheen for some people.

On topic, indeed, shaming is never an option. But still I wish companies would donate to projects - in some countries there are even tax incentives to do so, and the benefit is that they essentially externalise development of a valuable tool for them. Also would earn a lot of good will - as steam does (while not sponsoring money directly).

That is almost completely due to technological progress, not because of capitalism itself.

In so far as they have electrical heating, access to global food products, information technology, modern medical care, sure, plenty of people have a “higher standard of living” versus pre-industrialized societies. That’s a trivial statement. It’s vacuous.

Actually, what’s relevant is that the “poor” in any country have to work long, difficult jobs in order to survive. Some people even die or receive brutal injuries at work. And none of them are being compensated enough, because some people — like our version of medieval kings — don’t have to work at all.

In the context of this discussion, we have situations where people can’t afford to do obvious things that benefit themselves and others. I can’t point my finger and say “capitalism did this”, because the whole engine of human relations (economic, social, cultural) is incredibly vast, and capitalism is such a massive, loaded concept.

But I can sincerely say that somewhere along the line in this engine of human relations that there are very glaring issues that should make us question our sense of humanity.

I am not advocating for some massive, state sponsored rewriting of economic relations or technocratically calculated wealth transfers. The former was empirically a disaster in the 20th century. The latter is purely an academic debate. Nor am I saying that we ought to guilt trip people into donating more to support developers working on free projects. That feels manipulative, although making any community more self-sustaining and caring is obviously good.

I don’t know how fruitful parroting one of coldest takes (capitalism made people richer) can be in light of the lived realities of billions of people, working poor, passionate developers, and everyone who isn’t a 21st century robber baron. We are capable of being kinder and more open-minded.

The truth that society is constantly being reorganized every day. Even the shift from feudalism to “capitalism” happened over hundreds of years. In 300 years, people will look back at our current society and give it a name and analysis, because by then we would be living under a different paradigm. However, until then, future is what we make of it. And we could be more empathetic, and more imaginative.

For example, what if you were guaranteed housing, food, and water for working some government job (assigned at random even) a couple of days a week? Most likely people will not want to be janitors and the like so it makes sense to tie social needs to the benefits to offset this, and the food provided does not need to have a lot of choice, as long as it meets nutrition requirements.

Ambitious humans may want more, fine, allow an industry as we do now for people to grow and expand. In fact, competing with the government guaranteeing basic needs puts an easy floor on otherwise exploitative jobs. You have to at least beat the floor to attract any labor.

Software is essentially worthless once it exists. Even if many people and many businesses rely on it, there may not be any economic value in maintaining it. If you need to get paid, you may have to do something else for living.

What you're describing is where the interests of commercial users and free contributors diverge. When that doesn't align, commercial users have to tow the line. If they can't make that work, that's not Open Source's fault.