Open-Source Software Is Worth a Lot More Than You Pay for It | Hacker News Reader

Open-Source Software Is Worth a Lot More Than You Pay for It

bloomberg.com

66 pointspetethomas15 comments

> Open-source software may well be the greatest “public good” the market economy has ever produced. What it shows is the power of voluntary social cooperation.

And that's why Richard Stallman deserves to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Can those be awarded posthumously? I’m about it.

?? Stallman isn't dead

Source paper[0] is discussed at [1]

Related blog post criticizing this study[2]

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340277

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340146

Here are the implications of this:

The biggest beneficiaries of open source software are massive corporations such as Google, Facebook, etc.

By being worth more that what pay for it, open source is the largest transfer of value from the working class (software programmers) to the capital class (the owners of these corporations ).

I'm sure all the gurus that promote open-source receive way more money than the open-source developers.

Anyway, there is an easy fix for this: are you a corporation? You owe us $x for using our open-source software.

I would imagine that's why the GPL requires the release of derivative works under the same licence. At present that doesn't extend to hosting on the cloud. But then again developers of peer to peer file sharing software like Kazaa have been hounded quite extensively which seems to me to have been a factor in the development of today's cloud infrastructure.

On the flipside Microsoft and OpenAI don't appear to respect copyright now.

Perhaps with IPv6 not needing Network Address Translation we can go back to a peer to peer world. IoT would require it.

> At present that doesn't extend to hosting on the cloud.

If you use the AGPL variant it does.

The market economy deserves not one iota of credit for the Free Software I have written (millions of downloads). It was produced and donated to the world in spite of the market economy, not because of it.

I wonder how much open source software sits under what’s required to create this post, and that powers Bloomberg. I also wonder how much Bloomberg pays open source projects.

I got a paywall though so I can’t read the article. I guess there’s some irony there.

I used to work at Bloomberg. They do use plenty of open-source software, but they also open-source some of their own work, and they do support other projects, e.g. sqlite.

Bloomberg is certainly one of the better companies for reciprocal contribution. I use some of their projects, like memray, daily, and I've seen them contribute to a great many projects.

Financial contribution, I have no idea, but imo I value code contributions higher. Really depends on what you personally want out of your open source projects.

That’s great, and I’m with you on valuing code much more than financial contribution - that’s the spirit of open source.

But the article seems to point the other way, piling on the idea that OSS contributors need to be paid in cash directly somehow (haven’t read, paywall)?

For most people, Open-Source software is free at the very least warrants some money going towards the programmers, certainly much more than is the norm today.

Summer of Code should be a well-funded non-profit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com