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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Open source is the biggest voluntary transfer of wealth from the working class to the business/investor class ever.

Software in the modern economy is the "means of production" and software developers have given it away free to the business/investor class.

The investor class, happily funds software startup gambles that people pour their lives into knowing that most will fail but they will still statistically make bank.

Companies making billions of profits lay off people who have made massive contributions of open source ( see for example Ben Collins-Sussman https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-10-GoogleEx...) knowing that the software will still maintained by volunteers without them having to pay for it.

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My career solely exist because of foss. My salary level is only that high because of foss. I don't feel like I've been in a bad position.

> My career solely exist because of foss.

You are likely an excellent software engineer. Why would a company not have hired you to work on non-foss software?

They did. But how do you think I got interested in software in the first place? How do you think I practiced my skills ? How do you think I created my toolbox, met my peers, solved problems beyond my reach, and eventually created a company, while feeling good about it?

A lot of us did all that before FOSS was a big thing. Yes I did have to get my wallet out to buy a copy of Turbo C but it wasn't much of a barrier (at least compared to the hardware costs).

I guarantee that when I was an intern making 40% of minimum wage, it made all the difference.

Plus, let's not pretend most of us were not pirating all the paid stuff. Is that what we want our industry to be based on?

What's more, FOSS is so much more collaborative the docs, tutorial and communities made me grow so much faster than anything else professionally.

You frame it as a negative thing, but FOSS is a positive for society. I contribute to FOSS in ways that directly benefit myself, and incidentally benefit others. Incidentally I benefit from others' contributions to FOSS, as a consumer, and also as a business.

It's a positive sum good for everyone, not some adversarial zero-sum game.

It's so good that we need to be doing a lot more of it, and (I think we'd all agree) figure out more ways to allocate capital to FOSS.

I think Free Software is the means of production, but it's not a wealth transfer, it's capitalist value destruction, it's the elimination of entire swathes of the economy. It's a purely communist system of socialist common good.

The profit of the big corps almost never results from the FOSS itself.

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